Real-time audio steganography attack based on automatic objective quality feedback

Digital audio signal provides a large capacity for embedding hidden messages using digital steganography techniques. How to prevent hazardous steganography embedding on the Internet becomes an important task in the field of network security. For the Internet environment, the steganography attack method is required to be generic and real time. An active warden-based attack method is potential to be a generic method for the steganography attack. A discrete spring transform (DST)-based generic active warden steganography attack framework has been proposed by us. In this paper, based on the DST, a real-time steganography attack method is proposed. The potential unauthorized hidden message is removed in a real-time manner when uploading or downloading the audio signal. The real-time signal perceptual quality control is achieved by the automatic feedback from the objective audio quality evaluation model. The attack parameters are adaptively changed to reach a balance between the attack performance and the audio signal quality. The simulation results validate the proposed method in terms of the steganography attack performance and the audio signal quality after the attack. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.