A New Data Hiding Method via Revision History Records on Collaborative Writing Platforms

Abstract

A new data hiding method via collaboratively-written articles with forged revision history records on collaborative writing platforms is proposed. The hidden message is camouflaged as a stego-document consisting of a stego-article and a revision history created through a simulated process of collaborative writing. The revisions are forged using a database constructed by mining word sequences used in real cases from an English Wikipedia XML dump. Four characteristics of article revisions are identified and utilized to embed secret messages, including the author of each revision, the number of corrected word sequences, the content of the corrected word sequences, and the word sequences replacing the corrected ones. Related problems arising in utilizing these characteristics for data hiding are identified and solved skillfully, resulting in an effective multiway method for hiding secret messages into the revision history. To create more realistic revisions, Huffman coding based on the word sequence frequencies collected from Wikipedia is applied to encode the word sequences. Good experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed method.