Open Access

ARTICLE

An Efficient Sound and Data Steganography Based Secure Authentication System

Debajit Datta¹, Lalit Garg^2,*, Kathiravan Srinivasan³, Atsushi Inoue⁴, G. Thippa Reddy³, M. Praveen Kumar Reddy³, K. Ramesh⁵, Nidal Nasser⁶

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 the 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.

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Citations