ENHANCED SECURITY FOR AUDIO SIGNALS USING STEGANOGRAPHY

Abstract

Steganography is a useful tool that allows covert transmission of information over an overt communications channel. Combining covert channel exploitation with the encryption methods of substitution ciphers and/or one time pad cryptography, steganography enables the user to transmit information masked inside of a file in plain view. The hidden data is both difficult to detect and when combined with known encryption algorithms, equally difficult to decipher.
           In the current internet community, secure data transfer is limited due to its attack made on data communication. So more robust methods are chosen so that they ensure secured data transfer. One of the solutions which came to the rescue is the audio Steganography. But existing audio steganographic systems have poor interface, very low level implementation, difficult to understand and valid only for certain audio formats with restricted message size.
           In the proposed system which is based on audio Steganography and cryptography, ensures secure data transfer between the source and destination. It uses most powerful encryption algorithm in the first level of security, which is very complex to break. In the second level it uses a more powerful modified LSB (Least Significant Bit) Algorithm to encode the message into audio. It performs bit level manipulation to encode the message.
          The basic idea behind this paper is to provide a good, efficient method for hiding the data from hackers and sent to the destination in a safer manner. Though it is well modulated software it has been limited to certain restrictions. The quality of sound depends on the size of the audio which the user selects and length of the message. Though it shows bit level deviations in the frequency chart, as a whole the change in the audio cannot be determined.