Ensuring the Security of Text-based Information Transmission by Utilizing Invisible ASCII Characters

The universal storage and transmission of information by text-based documents makes information hiding technology an important topic in computer security. Currently, the popularly used text-based information techniques are facing many problems, such as poor robustness, low embedding rate, semantic clutter and can be easily distinguished by unaided eyes. In order to solve these problems, this paper puts forward a secret information transmission scheme for English texts by using the characteristics of some invisible ASCII codes. The scheme incorporates two stages, the information hiding stage and the information extracting stage. The first stage takes the prepared carrier documents and the secret information need to be embedded as the input. Then, the information hiding procedure of the scheme will synthesize the carrier document and the secret information into a steno (shorthand) document. In the second stage, an extracting procedure will pick up the secret information when it receives the steno document that generated by the first stage. The scheme achieves hiding effects by processing the bland spaces in the English texts. The experimental results have shown that our information hiding scheme is feasible, reliable, safe and efficient.