# A Comparative Analysis of Arabic Text Steganography
## 4 Arabic Text Steganography
### Diacritic Method

Table 9: A summary of the reviewed articles on the dot method. 8 different diacritics, of which 2 diacritics carry 1 element. The element table is stored as a one-dimensional array and contains all the English alphabets and numbers 0 to 9. The authors of [83] described an embedded method for hiding information in vocalized Arabic text. The method uses fully diacritic text, and if the secret bit is \"1,\" then the diacritic is presented as it is. Otherwise (if it is \"0\"), the diacritic is removed. On Arabic and Urdu text, the authors of [84] employed reversed Fathah to represent the document's concealed message. From the article written in the Arabic language, the hidden message was read and matched by character to the cover article. Then, the reversed Fathah was embedded in varied lines. The disadvantage of this method is that the text can be lost during retyping, and only one font possesses a static frame. However, this method can be applied to other similar scripts, such as Urdu. Perhaps its use can be considered in Asian scripts. The shifting of harakat was considered by the authors of [85]. The authors applied vertical shifting by 1/200 inches to hide \"1\" and no change to hide \"0.\"  
Showing or omitting diacritics have been used as techniques used to hide the secret bit [86]. Three embedding algorithms were developed: The Basic algorithm, Switch algorithm, and Parity algorithm. The Basic algorithm shows a diacritic to hide the secret bit \"1\" while it omits a diacritic to hide \"0.\" In the Switch algorithm, a diacritic is shown just when there is a change in the secret bits from \"1\" to \"0\" and vice versa in the secret bitstream sequence. The Parity algorithm sets a parity bit to every cover character in the text. If the cover character's position is an even number, then the parity bit of this character is \"0.\" Otherwise, it is \"1.\"  
Two diacritics (Kasrah and Fathah) were utilized to design an embedding algorithm in [87] by fragmenting the hidden message into two arrays of binary values, forming odd and even lists. The general idea is that the odd array list is hidden in the Fathah diacritics while the even array list is concealed in the Kasrah diacritics. The first odd bit of the hidden message is read by the program and compared with the initial Fathah in the cover text. For instance, if the initial odd bit to be concealed is \"1,\" the initial Fathah will not be touched. Otherwise, if the initial odd bit to be concealed is not \"1,\" the Fathah will be removed. Recently, a modified Fathah in Arabic text steganography was presented by the authors of [88]. First, the secret message was encrypted with the AES algorithm. Then, text steganography with modified Fathah was used to hide the encrypted data. The modified Fathah lies in the same direction as the original Fathah, slightly oriented to be like the original to avoid suspicions. The discussed diacritics method is summarized in Table 10. It can be concluded that most of the diacritics methods serve to enhance capacity. This is attributed to the benefits of diacritics' natural presence as historical characteristics of the Arabic language that originated for representing vowel sounds [78; 86]. Nevertheless, diacritic methods increase suspicion since diacritics appear abnormally. Moreover, most of the Arabic scripts nowadays have no diacritics.