Abstract
Steganography is the practice of hiding a secret message within different cover mediums to preserve data secrecy. This paper focuses on developing a performance-based stego-object tool for transmitting secret Arabic texts over the Internet by considering three main performance parameters namely: capacity, security, and robustness. The proposed tool has three modules: the first one is for hiding a secret message within Arabic cover text using Kashida (extension character) and diacritics. The main objective of the second module is to compare and select the highest performance stego-object based on developed performance criteria. The third module is for extracting the secret message from the stego-object text. The criteria for selecting the best performance cover text is based on the input coefficients by the users according to their preferences. The proposed tool has a great contribution to the practical use of steganography for hiding secret messages based on performance measures, and it will open a new direction for future research.