Open Access

ARTICLE

Hacking Anti-Shoplifting System to Hide Data within Clothes

by Al Hussien Seddik Saad^1,*, E. H. Hafez², Zubair Ahmad³

1 Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Minia University, Al-Minya, 61519, Egypt
2 Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt
3 Department of Statistics, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

* Corresponding Author: Al Hussien Seddik Saad. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 67(1), 659-674. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.014758

Received 14 October 2020; Accepted 08 November 2020; Issue published 12 January 2021

Abstract

Steganography has been used to prevent unauthorized access to private information during transmission. It is the scheme of securing sensitive information by concealing it within carriers such as digital images, videos, audio, or text. Current steganography methods are working by assigning a cover file then embed the payload within it by making some modifications, creating the stego-file. However, the left traces that are caused by these modifications will make steganalysis algorithms easily detect the hidden payload. Aiming to solve this issue, a novel, highly robust steganography method based on hacking anti-shoplifting systems has proposed to hide data within clothes. The anti-Shoplifting system is an anti-theft security system that protects goods and products, leaving the store in an illegal way (i.e., without paying for them). The proposed method works by modifying the default anti-shoplifting system by changing its built-in soft RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags sewn in clothes into NFC (Near Field Communication) tags. These NFC tags are smart tags that can communicate with NFC-Enabled smart-phones using NDEF (NFC Data Exchange Format). NDEF is one of the advancements added to RFID technology by NFC, which allows the data exchange. Every NDEF message has one/more NDEF records that contain record type, a unique ID, a length, and a payload of data that contains the secret message content that can be any type of data that fits in a byte stream. Based on NDEF and NFC-enabled smart-phones, the proposed method will take the secret message from the sender, make use of his NFC-enabled smart-phone to communicate with the NFC tag, then hide the secret message within the NDEF’s payload of the NFC tag stuck in clothes. Finally, to evaluate the proposed method, it has been compared with default (digital) steganography weak points. Such as time, lockable, robustness, attacks, capacity, and a few more points. The results and comparisons showed that the proposed method is more efficient than default (digital) steganography and has many advantages.

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Keywords

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