Real-time Attacks on Audio Steganography
Marcus Nutzinger · J. Inf. Hiding Multim. Signal Process. · 2012
Steganographic algorithms work in different ways to embed secret data into cover media. In this paper, techniques are presented which aim at the prevention of steganography usage in digital audio data, independent of the underlying algorithm. Differing from other approaches which try to detect embedded data or perform time- consuming computations as part of their process, we focus on a comprehensive steganog- raphy prevention which works in real-time on any audio data. In addition our techniques aim at minimizing the audio quality degradation, making them usable for different fields of application. Tests of our system show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques: The steganographic receiver is disturbed, resulting in increased bit error rates and rendering the steganographic channel unusable or at least limiting its usability. We also evaluate the resulting audio quality and compare our implementation to the StirMark for Audio benchmark. The results show that our apprach is different from this attack suite as we propose novel methods not available within StirMark for Audio and our emphasis is the preservation of the audio quality. The promising quality results as well as the prevention effectiveness justify the existance of our techniques as an enhancement to the StirMark for Audio benchmark.