LAUSR

Audio is a natural way of communication among persons. Nowadays, many cases of Phone-tapping, hacking of E-mail having some audio files have been reported. Hence, for sending a secret message in audio file over the internet, security and confidentiality must be assured. A secret message is commonly transmitted in encrypted form to assure confidentiality/security using a single key. This does not serve the purpose completely as knowing the key, the whole secret can be revealed. To enhance the security of the secret, sending it through multiple units is preferred. Here, a novel approach is proposed for the same. In the proposed approach an audio secret is divided into n audio shares such that information contained in any proper subset of share/shares (unit) is insignificant. With all the shares only secret can be revealed after performing some computation. Authenticity of the revealed secret can also be confirmed (if necessary) by checking the integrity of individual shares received. If any share is lost during transmission, the proposed scheme has the facility to determine the share number of the lost one, so that request may be sent for resending the same. The proposed scheme is suitable for real-time audio communication as the construction of shares is based upon the available bandwidth. Also, it does not need any cover audio to transmit the share. Experimentally, Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and correlation coefficient (r(S, Sr)) between input secret and revealed secret are found 5 and 0.99 respectively when there is no attack during the transmission. In case the total (either in one or more shares) attack is less than 50% of the size of a single share, MOS of the revealed secret lies between 3.8 to 4.