Real-Time Covert Communications Channel for Audio Signals

Covert communications channel is considered as a type of secure communications that creates capability to transfer information between entities while hiding the contents of the channel. Multimedia data hiding techniques can be used to establish a covert channel for secret communications within a media carrier. In this paper, a high-rate covert communications channel is developed to exploit an audio stream as a carrier signal using multiple embedding in the Quantization Index Modulation framework. The proposed approach uses multi quantization vectors to increase data transmission rate.