Twin K-Shuffle Based Audio Steganography

Abstract

Secure communication is most effective when it is covert. In the realm of covert communication, steganography conceals secret message within a cover medium. This ensures that adversaries who have access to this carrier medium are unaware of the existence of the secret message. This paper proposes a novel twin K-Shuffling and embedding technique that scrambles and hides secret message inside audio samples. The scrambling phase of the proposed technique consists of bit and character shuffling. The bit-shuffling scrambles the bit-string of each character in the secret message into cipher-text via K-Shuffle. The characters of the resulting cipher-text are then shuffled by another K-Shuffle technique to yield chaotic cipher-text. At the embedding phase, the scrambled cipher-text is randomly planted into the carrier audio samples. The novelty in this proposed technique is the provision of a three-layer protection for secret messages; bit, character, and encoding layers. Results and analyses show that this technique satisfied both embedding and encryption requirements of steganographic systems.