An Electronic Lattice Construction Method Based on Game Padding

The concealment, the steganography success rate, and the steganographic capacity are key performance indicators to text steganography. The existing text steganography methods still have a low steganographic capacity, some syntactic or semantic ambiguity problems to some extent. We propose an electronic lattice construction method based on a padding game to hide a secret message. This method first computes the length of a secret message and a key is worked out based on the length; the walking rule, the constraints to a hidden path, the initial size of a grid and the starting cell are determined based on the key and a unique hidden path can be figured out for the given secret; then the secret message is stored in the cells along the unique path and all the remaining cells in the grid are filled according to the padding game rules, which helps to obscure that secret message; finally, elements in some cells are removed to get the crossword that will be shared with the receiver. To extract the message, the receiver fills the crossword according to the same game rules as the sender does, and calculates that unique hidden path based on the shared key. The experimental results and analyses show that its concealment is prominent, its steganography success rate is 100%, and it has a high steganographic capacity. It also has no readability issue as the steganography by generation usually does.