Hiding Simple Text Files in Multimedia Files: A New Method and Its Implementation

Abstract

Specific data, due to their nature, must be adequately secured. It can be done, among others, by the use of steganographic methods, whose purpose is to hide information by embedding hidden information in a selected object (carrier). The most common way of hiding text in a carrier is the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. Nevertheless, this method requires a sufficiently large medium to host hidden information. This article proposes a new method to hide simple text files. Firstly, secret data is converted with a simple affine cipher (which can be replaced with another form of encryption). Then the content is transformed directly into the output file without using a carrier. The output file can be a graphic file with an RGB structure or a sound file. The method is discussed in the example of selected test files. As the analysis shows, the resulting data obtained occupy less disk space than those obtained using the LSB method. Additionally, the implementation of the method in the form of a Python script is presented. Finally, the modifications and limitations of the proposed method of hiding the text are discussed.