Exploring Covert Communication in Text Message on Android Smartphones

摘要

Android mobile phones are one of the most widely used phones. Sharing information in android apps is a very common. However, intruders and hackers may intercept the message which is passing through the network In this paper, we explore covert communication for hiding secret information in the most commonly used SMS and Contacts (default native apps) for android smartphones. We make use of text messages present in the SMS app that can recognize ASCII and UTF-8 encoding characters and develop steganography algorithms to embed secret information in the carrier message. Along with the character set, we also make use of emoticons and spaces present in the SMS app to hide the information.