Spread spectrum based encrypted audio steganographic system with improved security

Abstract

With rapid growth of the internet technology, steganography has gained increasing attention in the domain of information security. Audio steganography is a technique of hiding secret message inside an audio signal in an imperceptible manner. This paper discusses the implementation and analysis of an audio steganographic technique utilizing Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) scheme. The algorithm is enhanced to provide additional security by combining steganography with encryption. The secret message is first encrypted using a cryptographic algorithm, and then embedded in a cover audio using DSSS technique. The imperceptibility, security, capacity and accuracy of the proposed system have been evaluated using various performance metrics such as Signal to Noise Ratio, Peak signal to Noise Ratio, Bit Error Rate, Strength Factor, Chip Rate etc. After analyzing the experiment results, it is observed that the proposed implementation gives a more secure and robust steganographic system on the expense of compromising the embedding capacity. Such a system is ideally suited for covert communication in hostile environments, such as those related to military, defense and cyber intelligence, where short messages need to be communicated with high levels of security. The message embedding capacity could however be improved by increasing the capacity of the audio cover.