AUDIO STEGANOGRAPHY USING LEAST SIGNIFICANT BIT METHOD FOR CONFIDENTIAL DATA EMBEDDING

As the demand for secure communication increases, traditional encryption techniques, though effective, often expose the presence of sensitive information, making them vulnerable to detection. Audio steganography offers a more discreet alternative by embedding hidden data within audio signals, preserving the secrecy of the communication. Among existing methods, the Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique is widely used due to its simplicity and high imperceptibility. However, conventional LSB methods face limitations in embedding capacity, robustness, and decoding reliability, particularly when handling large datasets. This study proposes a modified LSB approach that addresses these issues by introducing a compact binary encoding scheme and a fixed End-of-File (EOF) marker to improve efficiency and accuracy. The method involves embedding custom binary representations of secret data into 8-bit audio samples, with extraction aided by the EOF marker. Results demonstrate that the waveform and spectrogram comparisons confirmed the imperceptibility of the modifications, with a 100% similarity score between original and stego-audio. While the technique is lightweight and effective, it is still susceptible to audio compression and signal manipulation. Future enhancements may include adaptive EOF patterns and integrated encryption to increase resistance to tampering. Overall, this research contributes a practical and efficient advancement to audio steganography, offering improved security for embedded data in digital audio communication.