A New Approach to Telugu Text Steganography by Shifting Inherent Vowel Signs

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity.  The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves.

Cryptography protects the contents of a message, steganography can be said to protect both messages and communicating parties. Wide ranges of algorithms have been introduced using text, audio, video and images files as covering media. This paper presents a new approach for steganography in Telugu texts. Taking the typical structure of Telugu alphabets into consideration, in this approach, by shifting inherent vowel signs either left or right, we hide the secret message. The approach shows good result on the sample collected from different Telugu newspaper.