Ameliorating LSB Using Piecewise Linear Chaotic Map and One-Time Pad for Superlative Capacity, Imperceptibility and Secure Audio Steganography

Audio steganography hides a secret message into an audio. Existing techniques are lacking in achieving high payload, imperceptibility in addition to robustness at the same time. They also suffer from choosing the samples and even LSBs in an unpredictable fashion. Moreover, few adaptive techniques exist, besides not many embed in higher LSBs. Hence, a novel LSB
$_{PWLCM}$
method that ameliorates LSB audio steganography is proposed. It uses piecewise linear chaotic map (PWLCM) to embed a secret message in random samples, besides selecting one of the 4-LSBs in an unsystematic way. It is noteworthy that each time a distinct sample and hence a differed 4-LSB is chosen as per different generated PWLCM. At first, Huffman coding is used to lessen the secret message size. Thereafter, to ameliorate the security of the one-time pad, random numbers are generated using PWLCM as an input key. This gives the proposed method a dual protection by amalgamating steganography with enhanced secure one-time pad. MATLAB is used to implement the proposed LSB
$_{PWLCM}$
method and evaluate the imperceptibility between cover and stego audios against standard parameters viz. Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality (PEAQ). Furthermore, its imperceptibility was tested using Mean Square Error, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Percentage Root Mean Square Difference and Audio Fidelity. Exhaustive experiments on vastly used metrics affirm that the proposed method LSB
$_{PWLCM}$
excel prevailing methods regarding hiding capacity and imperceptibility. Furthermore, it is resistant to brute force attacks having a large key space besides its dependency on the secret message size. In addition, it effectively withstood statistical analysis, specifically histogram attack and fourth first moments. Albeit it was vigorous towards re-sampling attacks, yet it was not very robust against LSB attacks nor noise. Assuredly, it prevails over existing methods and beyond comparison when juxtaposed with them affirming its efficacy.