Applied Steganographic System for Hiding Textual Information on Audio Files

Abstract

The article presents an applied steganographic system of hiding textual information in audio files on the basic of an advanced approach that combines the methods of steganography and cryptography. The method of the least significant bit (LSB) was used as a steganographic transformation algorithm. The low level of reliability of the method can be improved by introducing a cryptographic layer, the feasibility of which is justified in the article. The improvement is to add one of the modern symmetric encryption algorithms – the AES algorithm in CBC mode. The applied steganographic system for hiding textual information in audio files, taking into account the improvement of the LSB method, is implemented in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 environment using the cryptographic libraries that are present in it. The application is developed in the C++ programming language. NIST tests were used to assess the stability of the implemented system to steganalysis. The proposed approach is considered in order to anticipate its role in emerging networks.