A classical approach for hiding encryption key in the same encrypted text document

Abstract

Data encrypting and steganography techniques each have its own merits and weaknesses. Crackers and hackers developed many software applications that can attack the weakness of these techniques and thus can reach to the meaning of the private information and its existence. In this paper, a simple technique is proposed to make use of encrypting and steganography merits simultaneously, and thus makes any attempt for breaking both techniques at the same time harder than applying each of them alone. The proposal uses English, Arabic, or mixed writing plain text. Encrypting the text by AES-encrypting algorithm with an encryption key of 128 bit long and then hiding the encrypted text with only one part of the encrypting key (sender key only), in another English/Arabic (cover), plain text. The text hiding technique is done according to the nonprintable characters of the Unicode character set method. The proposed technique is coded into a form of Matlab program. Experimenting with this paper technique shows how difficult to break the system and thus can applying it in emailing private documents between users connected to a virtual network on an insecure public channel