Enhanced Security Audio Steganography by Using Higher Least Significant Bit

Abstract

Data hiding is an approach that conceals secret data into a carrier. Steganography is the art and science of storing information so that its existence is hidden. The goal of steganography is to communicate securely in a completely undetectable manner and hiding data efficiently to avoid unintended recipients to suspect the existence of steganographic medium that contains hidden data. The study had found that that the audio steganography using LSB technique can be easily broken to retrieve the data and vulnerable in security due to its low robustness. In this research, the scheme of Audio Steganography will be investigated to enhance LSB scheme with AES encryption and evaluate the robustness and quality of the scheme. This research presents Enhanced Security in Audio Steganography by using Higher Least Significant Bit to improve security and robustness by embedding bits of secret message in higher LSB of a cover audio. The stego key and AES encryption are applied to increase the security of the stego audio. Encoding process embeds the secret message while decoding process retrieves the secret message. In audio steganography, the secret message is embedded into a digitized audio signal which results in significant altering of binary sequences of the corresponding audio file. The result shows the scheme is robust and able to withstand steganography unintentional attack which is compression till 17% at maximum payload of 953 bps at 11th LSB. This new scheme model is proven to increase the robustness using higher LSB and will be useful as a basis for Audio Steganography.