Pit stop for an audio steganography algorithm

Abstract

Steganography plays an important role in the field of secret communication. The security of such communication lies in the impossibility of proving that secret communication is taking place. We evaluate the implementation of a previously published spread spectrum technique for steganography in auditive media. We have unveiled and solved several weaknesses that compromise undetectability. The spread-spectrum approach of the technique under evaluation is rather unusual for steganography and makes the secret message fit to survive A/D and D/A conversions of analogue audio telephony, re-encoded speech channels of GSM/UMTS, or VoIP. Its impact to signal statistics, which is at least concealed by the lossy channel, is reduced. There is little published on robust audio steganography, its steganalysis, and evaluation, with the possible exception of audio watermarking, where undetectability is not as important. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.