Research on covert communication channel based on modulation of common compressed speech codec

As is well known, multimedia has been widely used in VoIP and mobile communications. Research on how to establish covert communication channel over the above popular public applications has been flourishing in recent years. This paper tries to present a novel and effective method to construct a covert channel over common compressed speech stream by embedding sense information into it. In our method, after analysing the characteristic features of the excitation pulse positions of the ITU-T G.723.1 and G.729A speech codec, we design a novel and effective covert communication channel by finely modulating the codes of excitation pulse positions of the above two codecs in line with the secret information to be hidden. To improve the embedding capacity of the proposed method, we also use all the odd/even characteristics of pulse code positions to conduct information hiding. To test and verify the proposed approach, experiments are conducted on several different scenarios. Experimental results show that our methods and algorithms perform a higher degree of secrecy and sound information embedding efficacy compared with exiting similar methods.