LSB-based Audio Steganographical Framework for Securing Data in Transit

Abstract

The benefits that individuals and organizations derive from the digital era comes with its own challenges. Globally, data has become one of the greatest assets for decision making and operational improvements among businesses, government agencies and even individuals. Data on its own and at its source does not make so much contribution to business processes. Data is transmitted from one location to another towards attainment of its goal as a critical resource in decision making. However, data including sensitive or confidential ones are transmitted via public channels such as the Internet. The data so transmitted via the Internet is vulnerable to interception and unauthorized manipulation. This demands that data in transit is protected from the prying eyes of the malicious internet users. One of such strategies for transmitting data via public channels such as the Internet without attracting attention from intruders is steganography. In this paper, the least significant bit algorithm was used with an audio file for hiding data in transit. The algorithm used in this research proves to be one of the simplest ways of securing data using audio steganography. The method employed the LSB technique by using audio files as the stego object for the final implementation in the Java programming language. The experimental results proved to be one of the best methods of implementing steganography. The accuracy of the stego objects shows high quality, and similarity scores with an improved processing time.