Increasing the security of mp3 steganography using AES Encryption and MD5 hash function

Abstract

In the internet age, the security of data exchange becomes risky from some tapping attacks. One of the ways to maintain the data's security is by using steganography techniques. In this paper, steganography is combined with cryptography for security enhancement. The cover media is mp3 audio file. Since mp3 is a file that has been widely used in the Internet as a medium of entertainment, the secret message has been embedded to the homogenous frame of mp3 file. Before being embedded into the mp3 file, the secret message was encrypted with Advance Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm using a key that had been processed by Message Digest 5 (MD5) hash function. The secret message file type inserted could be in the form of text, image, audio, video, or compressed file. The result shows that the steganographic capacity does not depend on the size of mp3 but on the number of homogeneous frames owned by mp3 audio file. The result also shows that the method which combined steganography and cryptography, was successfully done without reducing the quality of used mp3 audio file.