A packet loss tolerant algorithm for information hiding in voice over IP

Abstract

Steganography is the science of hiding information in such a way that an adversary wouldn't know it existed. As a result of research in this field, there are now many practical steganography tools for mediums that aren't processed in real time. However, research on real time mediums, for example Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), isn't as mature. While significant and ever-improving research has been done towards increasing throughput and decreasing signs of tampering in VoIP steganography, some research lacks important considerations that hinder development of practical tools. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that enables data hiding in G.711, the most commonly used voice codec for VoIP devices, while gracefully handling packet loss. We use important performance metrics to evaluate our algorithm, namely, throughput, noise-to-signal ratio and the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality algorithm. We demonstrate that our algorithm performs well compared to other algorithms proposed in the literature in real world environments where packet loss is inevitable, by maintaining high throughput and good speech quality.