Authentication for AAC compressed audio using data hiding

Authentication of digital audio has become indispensable for validating genuine information, especially in very important situations involving legal issues. Study in audio authentication especially for AAC audio is still limited and the conventional authentication techniques are mostly applicable to MP3 audio and uncompressed audio. In this work, we propose an authentication scheme for AAC compressed audio based on data hiding technique, where interconnected authentication values (i.e., temporal dependency) and cryptographic hash function are utilized. The proposed authentication scheme can detect any tampering of audio spectral values at the expense of small degradation in audio quality. Experiments were carried out to verify the basic performance of the proposed authentication method. At the expense of < 0.19 dB in terms of SNR, the proposed method can authenticate the source (sender) of the audio and detect the tampered frames, if any.