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A linguistic steganography based on word indexing compression and candidate selection

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Abstract

In this paper, a novel linguistic steganography with high imperceptibility and undetectability is proposed via secret message compression and candidate text selection. The length of the practical embedded payload can be reduced by the proposed word indexing compression algorithm(WIC), while a best stego text with high undetectability can be selected from candidates by the stego text selection strategy. WIC algorithm losslessly compresses the secret message by combining a minimum maximum weight algorithm with Huffman coding under the help of the candidate cover text. To improve the anti-steganalysis capability, ten cover texts with small compression ratios are selected from a huge cover text set, and are embedded the corresponding compressed secret message by using synonym substitutions. Only one stego text is selected by a given rule derived from the distance between a cover text and its stego text. Experimental results show that the proposed compression algorithm achieves better compression ratios than Huffman and LZW coding algorithms leading to higher embedding efficiency, and our steganography performs well in anti-steganalysis capability with compression and the stego text selection rule.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been performed in the Project “Research on Theory and Approach of Secure Text Steganography” supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61202439), and partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61302159).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Processing of Big Data on Transportation, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, China

    Lingyun Xiang

  2. School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, China

    Lingyun Xiang & Wenshuai Wu

  3. School of Maths and Computing Science, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, China

    Xu Li

  4. Zhengzhou Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, China

    Chunfang Yang

Authors
  1. Lingyun Xiang
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  2. Wenshuai Wu
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  3. Xu Li
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  4. Chunfang Yang
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Correspondence to Lingyun Xiang.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Xiang, L., Wu, W., Li, X. et al. A linguistic steganography based on word indexing compression and candidate selection. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 28969–28989 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6072-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6072-8

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