A Comparative Study of Audio Steganography Schemes

Abstract

Steganography conceals the existence of secret information, while cryptography hides the meaning of the secret information. Therefore, combining these two can provide a secure communication between a sender and a receiver. This article proposes a double–layer message security scheme where cryptography is the first layer and steganography is the second layer. AES– 256, Blowfish, or a Logistic map is used in the cryptography layer. The LSB substitution technique is used for the steganography layer to embed a secret message inside a cover audio. The LSB substitution technique is applied by alternating between the left and the right channels, respectively. Performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated in terms of a hearing test, running time, embedding capacity, waveform plots, as well as a large number of statistical, time–domain and frequency–domain metrics. Furthermore, a comparison among the proposed schemes and its counterparts from the is also provided. The numerical results show that the proposed schemes exhibit a very good performance.