A New Property Coding in Text Steganography of Microsoft Word Documents

Electronic documents, similarly as printed documents, need to be secured by adding some specific features that allow efficient copyright protection, authentication, document tracking or investigation of counterfeiting and forgeries. Microsoft Word is one of the most popular word processors, and several methods exist for embedding data specially in documents produced by it. We present a new type of methods for hiding data in Microsoft Word documents, named as Property coding, which deploys properties of different document objects (e.g., characters, paragraphs, and sentences) for embedding data. We give four different ways of Property coding, which are resistant to save actions, introduce very small overhead on the document size (about 1%), can embed up to 8 bits per character, and of course, are unnoticed by readers. Property coding belongs to format based methods of text steganography. Keywords–Data Hiding; Microsoft Word.