Audio Steganography Technique using DCT-SWT with RC4 Encryption

The presence of digital devices and the internet has made information and communication technologies rapidly expanding. Security and confidentiality-related technologies are still much complained of by many to date, while technology has brought enormous benefits to the interests of individuals and groups. In this case, security and confidentiality are essential addressed. Therefore, steganography is one solution to the problem. In this study, a steganography audio system was designed with the disrete cosine transform-stationary wavelet transform (DCT-SWT) encrypted method of RC4. Messages before being inserted first performed the encryption process with the RC4 algorithm to increase message security. DCT changes the signal at the time domain into the frequency domain, and the SWT decomposes the signals into low and high-frequency sub-bands. The performance of the steganography audio system is analyzed and measured based on quality parameters. After the entire attack, the process optimization of the parameters is conducted by evaluating the high BER value. The proposed audio steganography technique is resistant to LPF, BPF, Resampling, TSM, and LSC attacks. Messages with RC4 and without RC4 have a similar quality value, which means that RC4 does not significantly inhibit a steganography audio system's quality value and performance. Many character messages significantly affect the performance of a steganography audio system. The more the character of the message, the less the quality and the performance of a steganography audio system.