Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Huffman table swapping-based steganograpy for MP3 audio

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Raw audios contain significant amount of redundancy which can be used for steganographic purposes. But practically most audios are stored and transmitted in the compressed formats. In this paper, we present a MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) audio CODEC based steganographic method to embed secret message during encoding. The Huffman tables in MP3 standard are first partitioned into three groups. The secret message is then embedded by Huffman table swapping strategy. Instead of fully decoding the stego-audio, the extraction of the secret message can be done just by parsing the side information. The proposed method is designed under the restrictions of the MP3 compression standard without any modifications or additions to the existing standard. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide much higher capacity than other approaches, while satisfying the low distortion and security requirements for steganography on MP3 audios.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bender W, Gruhl D, Morimot N, Liu A (1996) Techniques for data hiding. IBM Syst J 35(3&4):313–336

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Cachin C (1998) An information-theoretic model for steganography. Proceedings of 2nd International Workshop on Information Hiding, LNCS 1525:306–318

    Google Scholar 

  3. Cvejic N, Seppanen T (2004) Increasing robustness of LSB audio steganography using a novel embedding method. Proc IEEE Int Conf Inf Technol Coding Comput 2:533–537

    Google Scholar 

  4. ISO/IEC (1993) Information technology—coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to about 1.5 M bit/s—part 3: audio IS 11172-3

  5. ITU (1998) Methods for objective measurements of perceived audio quality. ITU-R BS.1387

  6. Kim DH, Yang SJ, Chung JH (2004) Additive data insertion into MP3 bitstream using linbits characteristics. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 181–184

  7. Koukopoulos D, Stamatiou C (2005) An efficient watermarking method for MP3 audio files. Internatinal Enformatika Conference, Enformatika, Çanakkale, Turkey, pp 154–159

    Google Scholar 

  8. Moghadam N, Sadeghi H (2005) Genetic content-based MP3 audio watermarking in MDCT domain. Internatinal Enformatika Conference, Enformatika, Çanakkale, Turkey, pp 348–351

    Google Scholar 

  9. Nahrstedt N, Qiao L, Dittmann I (1998) Non-invertible watermarking methods for MPEG video and audio. The 6th ACM International Multimedia Conference. Bristol, England, pp 93–98

    Google Scholar 

  10. Neubauer C, Herre J, Brandenburg K (1998) Continuous steganographic data transmission using uncompressed audio. Proceedings of Information Hiding Workshop, pp 208–217

  11. Petitcolas FAP (2002) MP3Stego. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/∼fapp2/steganography/mp3stego/index.html

  12. Provos N, Honeyman P (2003) Hide and seek: an introduction to steganography. IEEE Secur Privacy Mag 1(3):32–44

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Takagi K, Sakazawa S, Takishima Y (2005) Light weight MP3 watermarking method for mobile terminals. IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences, pp 2546–2554

  14. Torrubia A, Mora F (2002) Perceptual cryptography on MPEG-1 Layer III bit-streams. IEEE Trans Consum Electron 48(4):1046–1050

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Viswanathan V (2008) Information hiding in wave files through frequency domain. Appl Math Comput 201(1&2):121–127

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Wang S, Zhang X, Zhang K (2003) Data hiding in digital audio by frequency domain dithering. Lect Notes Comput Sci 2776:383–394

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Westfeld A (2003) Detecting low embedding rates. Lect Notes Comput Sci 2578:324–339

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60873220, Ningbo Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. 2009A610085 and also supported by the Scientific Research Fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education Department under Grant No. 20070974.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University, 818, Feng hua Road, Zhejiang, 315211, China

    Diqun Yan & Rangding Wang

Authors
  1. Diqun Yan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Rangding Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diqun Yan.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Yan, D., Wang, R. Huffman table swapping-based steganograpy for MP3 audio. Multimed Tools Appl 52, 291–305 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0430-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0430-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation