A Novel Steganography Approach to Embed Secret Information into a Legitimate URL

Hiding confidential digital information in today's modern communication system is a very challenging task. Even though many algorithms have been developed to ensure the security of information delivered via the communication channel, many flaws have been discovered over time. Steganography is the science of hiding the existence of secret information. The concept of steganography is about embedding the secret data in a cover file in which the cover file could be an image, audio, video, text, or any other medium. Successfully formulating an algorithm that embeds the secret information in a cover file will produce a new file called the stego file. This research aims to develop a new methodology in which the secret information will be embedded into a legitimate URL link. Unlike the usual methods that hide the secret message in the content of another file, this method uses a valid form of the URL link to hide the secret message. Since the URL is a type of text that links users to a web page and is not an informative text to be read, it results in a secure method to pass secret information as no one pays attention to a URL text. This method combines and implements different techniques, abbreviates, searches, and matches bits and converts to allowed URL characters to encode the secret message. The results show that it works well with legitimate URLs, including the website's homepage URL.