A Comparative Study of Audio Steganography Schemes

Abstract

Steganography conceals the existence of secret information, while cryptography hides the meaning of the confidential 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 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 between the proposed scheme using AES–256 and its counterparts from the literature is also provided. The numerical results show that the proposed schemes exhibit very good performance.