Presenting a Method for Improving Echo Hiding
This work addresses security and reliability issues in audio steganography for VoIP users, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing echo hiding methods.
The paper tackles the problem of high error rates and low security in echo hiding steganography for VoIP by proposing a combined method based on spread spectrum, which resulted in a 10% improvement in extraction accuracy and a 3% increase in steganalysis errors.
In this article, one of the most important methods of steganography on VoIP called echo hiding is improved. This method has advantages in maintaining the statistical and perceptual characteristics of audio signals as well as security against the sensitivity of the human audio system (HAS). However, it has lots of errors in detecting coded and hidden messages, which is detectable using existing steganalysis methods. The percentage of extracting messages in these improved methods of echo hiding is high, but they lower the security of the method. In this article, a method is presented to improve the method of extracting echo hiding, and enhance its security through a combined method based on spread spectrum. To improve the extraction, a wrong hypothesis is corrected and substituted. To improve security using a pseudo-random key generation algorithm, spread spectrum and echo hiding methods are used randomly. To evaluate the proposed extraction, numerous extraction tests are carried out in the normal state and in the event of attacks. A steganalyser has also been used to assess security improvements. The results gained through different experiments on the security of steganography indicate a 3-percent increase in steganalysis errors. The proposed extraction method was modified based on the main method and resulted in more than 10% improvement.