A novel quantum steganography-Steganalysis system for audio signals

Abstract

As a substitute for classical solutions, quantum information hiding techniques have become an essential issue in the field of quantum communications by utilizing the inherent features of quantum mechanics and creating more secured communications for the more reliable exchange of digital media within the context of quantum communications networks. Quantum steganography has been considered as one of these approaches in recent years, but the importance of investigating and discovering these hidden communications within the context of quantum communication networks that require the use of quantum steganalysis methods has not been addressed so far. Therefore, in this paper, a novel quantum steganography-steganalysis system for digital audio signals is proposed, which can accurately detect audio steganography methods in the context of quantum communication networks. The proposed model consists of two separate sections: steganography and steganalysis; in the steganography part, to minimize the impacts of the embedding process and increasing the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), the embedding operation is carried out within the Least Significant Fractional Qubit (LSFQ) of the amplitude information of the audio signal samples. Then, a universal steganalyzer in the steganalysis part distinguishes the stego audio signals using the extracted statistical features from the audio signals. The universal steganalyzer consists of a mean feature extraction module to extract features from the audio signal frames and the quantum circuits for implementing the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm and the Hamming distance criterion. The simulation-based quantum circuits of the proposed system tested and evaluated using different audio files. Over 80% accuracy in detecting stego audio signals indicates high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed scheme and its applicability in quantum communication networks. Along with the higher efficiency and security of quantum steganography methods when compared with the classical one, the results show that the proposed quantum steganography-steganalysis scheme is also capable of competing with classical methods in terms of accurately detecting steganography methods.