Open Access
ARTICLE
An Efficient Sound and Data Steganography Based Secure Authentication System
1 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore, 632014, India
2 Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, University of Malta, Msida, MSD2080, Malta
3 School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore, 632014, India
4 Department of Information Systems & Business Analytics, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA99202, USA
5 Department of Computer Science, Karnataka State Akkamahadevi Women’s University, Vijayapura, India
6 College of Engineering, Alfaisal University, Riyadh, 1153, Saudi Arabia
* Corresponding Author: Lalit Garg. Email:
(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Entrepreneurship)
Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 67(1), 723-751. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.014802
Received 18 October 2020; Accepted 07 November 2020; Issue published 12 January 2021
Abstract
The prodigious advancements in contemporary technologies have also brought in the situation of unprecedented cyber-attacks. Further, the pin-based security system is an inadequate mechanism for handling such a scenario. The reason is that hackers use multiple strategies for evading security systems and thereby gaining access to private data. This research proposes to deploy diverse approaches for authenticating and securing a connection amongst two devices/gadgets via sound, thereby disregarding the pins’ manual verification. Further, the results demonstrate that the proposed approaches outperform conventional pin-based authentication or QR authentication approaches. Firstly, a random signal is encrypted, and then it is transformed into a wave file, after which it gets transmitted in a short burst via the device’s speakers. Subsequently, the other device/gadget captures these audio bursts through its microphone and decrypts the audio signal for getting the essential data for pairing. Besides, this model requires two devices/gadgets with speakers and a microphone, and no extra hardware such as a camera, for reading the QR code is required. The first module is tested with real-time data and generates high scores for the widely accepted accuracy metrics, including precision, Recall, F1 score, entropy, and mutual information (MI). Additionally, this work also proposes a module helps in a secured transmission of sensitive data by encrypting it over images and other files. This steganographic module includes two-stage encryption with two different encryption algorithms to transmit data by embedding inside a file. Several encryption algorithms and their combinations are taken for this system to compare the resultant file size. Both these systems engender high accuracies and provide secure connectivity, leading to a sustainable communication ecosystem.Keywords
Cite This Article
D. Datta, L. Garg, K. Srinivasan, A. Inoue, G. Thippa Reddy et al., "An efficient sound and data steganography based secure authentication system," Computers, Materials & Continua, vol. 67, no.1, pp. 723–751, 2021.Citations
