On using emoticons and lingoes for hiding data in SMS

Abstract

SMS is widely used as a daily communication service among people around the world. As such, SMS is a suitable means that can be readily exploited for transferring secret messages between individuals in a less conspicuous way. In this paper, we present an investigation on the suitability of hiding secret message in SMS. The hidden data are represented as lingoes and emoticons which are frequently used by users in SMS and chat. As a result, a pre-shared list, which is common between the sender and receiver is used to embed, and later extract the secret message in SMS in a natural form. The proposed method is implemented and tested on Android based mobile device, and showed some desirable outcomes.