A Robust MP3 Steganographic Method against Multiple Compressions Based on Modified Discrete Cosine Transform

Yunzhao Yang,Xianfeng Zhao,Xiaowei Yi,Jinghong Zhang,Jinwei Wang

doi:10.1155/2021/4471117

Yunzhao Yang, Xianfeng Zhao + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/4471117

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Abstract

MP3 appears in various social networking sites wildly, and it is very suitable to be applied for covert communication indeed. However, almost all social networking sites recompress the uploaded MP3 files, which leads to the ineffectiveness of the existing MP3 steganographic methods. In this paper, a robust MP3 steganographic algorithm is proposed with the ability of multiple compressions resistance. First, we discover a new embedding domain with strong robustness. The scalefactor bands of higher energy are applied as the embedding bands. The message bits are embedded by adjusting the position of the MDCT coefficients with the largest magnitude in the embedding bands. Besides, the embedding and extraction operations are realized in the process of MP3 decoding at the same time. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed method is of strong robustness against multiple MP3 compressions. The bit error rate is less than 1% at the MP3 bitrate of 320 kbps. It is worth mentioning that the proposed method is proved to be applicable to social networking sites, such as SoundCloud, for covert communication. Our method achieves a satisfactory level of embedding capacity, imperceptibility, and undetectability.

Highlights

Steganography is the art of embedding secret messages into innocent-looking digital files for cover communication
Many social networking sites transcode the uploaded files for higher transmission efficiency, which will bring an unpredictable impact on the embedding elements of the carrier files. us, the steganographic methods must be robust enough against the transcoding while achieving a satisfactory level of undetectability performance
A robust MP3 steganographic method against social networking transcoding is proposed in this paper. e algorithm is implemented in the process of MP3 decoding, which is convenient and fast

Summary

Introduction

Steganography is the art of embedding secret messages into innocent-looking digital files for cover communication. For the encoding parameters-based methods, the messages are embedded by adjusting window type [1], quantization step [2, 3], Huffman table index [4], and so forth. Considering that the energy relations are often robust to various digital signal processings, among the 21 scalefactor bands in each frame, the first k scalefactor bands with the largest energy are selected as the embedding bands In this way, even after multiple compressions, the corresponding embedding bands can be located to extract the secret messages. The proposed method provides strong robustness against multiple compressions attacks, so it can be applied to covert communication based on social networking sites. The PCM samples that can be used for playback are obtained by synthesis polyphase filter bank

The Proposed Method

Experiments

Findings

Conclusion and Future Work