Listega: list-based steganography methodology

• Authors: Abdelrahman Desoky
• Venue: International Journal of Information Security
• Year: 2009

The use of textual list of items, e.g., products, subjects, books, etc., is widely popular and linguistically legible. This motivates the development of List-Based Steganography Methodology (Listega). Listega takes advantage of such use of textual list to camouflage data by exploiting itemized data to conceal messages. Simply, it encodes a message then assigns it to legitimate items in order to generate a text-cover in a form of list. The generated list of items, the text-cover, can be embedded among other legitimate noncoded items for more protection based on a predetermined protocol among communicating parties such as read every other item, every fifth item, or any other way than the use of particular sequence. Listega neither hides data in a noise (errors) nor produces noise. Instead, it camouflages data by manipulating noiseless list of legitimate items. Listega establishes a covert channel among communicating parties by employing justifiably reasons based on the common practice of using textual list of items in order to achieve unsuspicious transmission of generated covers. The presented implementation, validation, and steganalysis of Listega demonstrate: the robustness capabilities of achieving the steganographic goal, the adequate room for concealing data, and the superior bitrate of roughly 1.32 up to 3.87% than contemporary linguistic steganography approaches.