Combined audio steganography and AES encryption to hide the text and image into audio using DCT

Abstract

Recently, security has become the prime concern for any organization and other civil and military applications. In this field of security, the data security during communication over an insecure wireless channel is the most important task which can be done by performing cryptography, watermarking and steganography. However, cryptography and watermarking schemes can be identified easily because of change in the data structure hence attackers can focus on that particular part to hack the secret information whereas steganography is a hiding mechanism in which secret message can be concealed into the cover and it can be retrieved at the receiver end. Several techniques have been introduced during last decade which are focused on image-image steganography and audio steganography. In the proposed work, we concentrate on audio steganography and develop a novel approach where secret message can be in the form of plain text or image, whereas cover message is in the form of audio. In order to provide additional security to this model we incorporate AES encryption scheme where secret message is encrypted and hidden in the cover audio. The proposed approach uses DCT coefficient computation and AES encryption scheme. An extensive experimental study is carried based on different test cases and evaluated against state-of-art techniques. The experimental study shows that the proposed approach achieves better performance for audio steganography.