A hybrid method for data communication using encrypted audio steganography

Audio steganography provides a smart solution for secure data transferring. Meanwhile, encryption provides a high level of robustness for the secret message. Combining steganography with cryptography provides a confidential, efficient, and hidden method of communication. Symmetric encryption algorithms alone like AES and 3DES are common, secure, and fast. However, they lack a secure mechanism of key exchange, which may limit the scope of a secure data transfer. On the other hand, asymmetric encryption algorithms overcome the key exchange hazard. The key size for a secure asymmetric algorithm like RSA should be above than 1024- bit long, which reduce the speed of encryption and decryption significantly. Those limitations, namely (1) the key exchange problem in the symmetric encryption, and (2) the longer time consumption of encryption and decryption in the asymmetric algorithms like RSA. The proposed method aims to overcome those limitations and therefore improve the security and robustness. The proposed method is based on two well known algorithms namely Diffie-Hellman and AES. Furthermore, the proposed method provides flexible key exchange mechanism in a hidden fashion and ensuring speed of performance. This method is expected to provide a significant improvement in security and robustness. � 2017 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.