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Covert voice over internet protocol communications based on spatial model

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Abstract

This paper presents a new spatial steganography model for covert communications over voice over internet protocol (VoIP), providing a solution to the issue of increasing the capacity of covert VoIP channels without compromising the imperceptibility of the channels. Drawing from Orthogonal Modulation Theory in communications, the model introduced two concepts, orthogonal data hiding features and data hiding vectors, to covert VoIP communications. By taking into account the variation characteristics of VoIP audio streams in the time domain, a hiding vector negotiation mechanism was suggested to achieve dynamic self-adaptive steganography in media streams. Experimental results on VoIP steganography show that the proposed steganographic method effectively depicted the spatial and temporal characteristics of VoIP audio streams, and enhanced robustness against detection of steganalysis tools, thereby improving the security of covert VoIP communications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    YongFeng Huang

  2. Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    YongFeng Huang

  3. School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China

    ShanYu Tang

  4. Department of Computing, London Metropolitan University, London, N7 8DB, UK

    ShanYu Tang

Authors
  1. YongFeng Huang
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  2. ShanYu Tang
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Correspondence to ShanYu Tang.

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Huang, Y., Tang, S. Covert voice over internet protocol communications based on spatial model. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 59, 117–127 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5955-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5955-4

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