Terms, Acronyms & Scientific References
This reference contains the formal glossary of cybersecurity and steganographic acronyms along with the complete bibliography of peer-reviewed scientific citations from the project research.
1. Master Terms & Acronyms Table (Table 10.1)
| Acronym | Full Term & Technical Definition |
|---|---|
| AES | Advanced Encryption Standard — FIPS 197 symmetric block cipher standard. |
| AES-CTR | Advanced Encryption Standard in Counter Mode — Stream cipher mode with 0-byte overhead. |
| ASCII | American Standard Code for Information Interchange — 7-bit character encoding. |
| CIA | Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability — Foundational cybersecurity triad. |
| CT | Cover Text — The innocent carrier medium used to conceal secret messages. |
| CVE | Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures — Standardized cybersecurity flaw identifiers. |
| DOM | Document Object Model — In-memory programmable node tree of HTML documents. |
| FPE | Format-Preserving Encryption — Encrypts data while maintaining exact character format. |
| HMAC | Hash-Based Message Authentication Code — Keyed cryptographic authentication function. |
| IV | Initialization Vector — Initial state block used to seed stream cipher counters. |
| LZW | Lempel–Ziv–Welch — Dictionary-based lossless data compression algorithm. |
| NIST | National Institute of Standards and Technology — United States standards authority. |
| PBKDF2 | Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 — High-entropy cryptographic key stretching standard. |
| CSPRNG / PRNG | Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator — Deterministic cryptographic random sequence generator (AES-256-CTR CSPRNG with Dual-Engine Fallback to Mulberry32). |
| SHA-256 | Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit — Cryptographic one-way 32-byte digest (FIPS PUB 180-4). |
| ST | Secret Text — The confidential payload message concealed inside the carrier. |
| UTF-8 | Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit — Variable-width character encoding standard. |
| VS | Variation Selectors — Invisible Unicode combining characters (U+FE00–U+FE0F & U+E0100–U+E01EF). |
| WASM | WebAssembly — W3C high-performance binary bytecode execution target for browsers. |
| XOR | Exclusive OR — Fundamental bitwise logic gate utilized for spatial mapping ($K = C \oplus M$). |
| XSS | Cross-Site Scripting — Code injection attack targeting client DOM contexts. |
| ZWC | Zero Width Characters — Non-printing Unicode control symbols (e.g. ZWNJ, ZWJ). |
2. Scientific References (Selected Citations)
- BBC News, "Facebook security breach: Up to 50 million accounts affected," 2018.
- CNN Business, "WhatsApp says a security flaw allowed hackers to install spyware on phones," 2019.
- N. F. Johnson and S. Jajodia, "Exploring steganography: Seeing the unseen," IEEE Computer, pp. 26-34, 1998.
- P. Butler, "Emoji Encoder," GitHub, 2025.
- M. A. Majeed, R. Sulaiman and Z. Shukur, "New Text Steganography Technique based on Multilayer Encoding with FPE and Huffman Coding," IJACSA, vol. 13, no. 12, 2022.
- M. Kwan, "SNOW – whitespace steganography program," 2013.
- M. T. Ahvanooey et al., "AITSteg: An Innovative Text Steganography Technique for Hidden Transmission via Social Media," 2018.
- M. Hassaballah and A. I. Awad, Digital Media Steganography: Principles, Algorithms, and Advances, Academic Press, 2020.