Exploiting Redundancy in English Language for Hiding Secret Data in Innocent News Articles

With the emergence of several steganography techniques, linguistic steganography is one of the most promising. This paper aims to apply specific techniques in linguistic steganography and quantify their potential to hide secret messages. The techniques that were tested rely on the redundancy in English language. The medium through which the tests were conducted was newspaper articles across various categories, namely, Technology, Sports, Business, Politics, and Entertainment. Since linguistic steganography relies on redundancies in the fabric of the language, we calculated the occurrences of the words, phrases, or grammatical structures through which the secret messages can be passed as dictated by the rules. These rules are manipulations of different linguistic structures of English language. Specifically, Coordinary Conjunction, Abbreviations, Subordinating Conjunctions, Phrasal Verbs, as well as Pronouns and their Identifiers. The newspaper articles were further classified into several categories, to compare which category is the most suitable to carry bits, according to a specific linguistic rule.