Steganography in Arabic Text Using Zero Width and Kashidha Letters

The need for secure communication methods has significantly increased with the explosive growth of the internet and mobile communications. The usage of text documents has doubled several times over the past years especially with mobile devices. In this paper we propose a new steganography algorithm for Arabic text. The algorithm employs some letters that can be joined with other letters. These letters are the extension letter, Kashida and Zero width character. The extension letter, Kashida, does not have any change in the word meaning if joined to other letters. Also, the Zero width character (Ctrl+ Shift +1) does not change the meaning. The new proposed algorithm, Zero Width and Kashidha Letters (ZKS), mitigate the possibility to be discovered by steganoanalysis through using parallel connection and permutation function.