Abstract
With the unprecedented growing demand for communication between Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the upcoming 5G and 6G technologies will pave the path to a widespread use of ultra-reliable low-latency applications in such networks. However, with most of the sensitive data being transmitted over wireless links, security, privacy and trust management are emerging as big challenges to handle. IoT applications vary, from self-driving vehicles, drone deliveries, online shopping, IoT smart cities, e-healthcare and robotic assisted surgery, with many applications focused on Voice over IP (VoIP) and require securing data from potential eavesdroppers and attackers. One well-known technique is a hidden exchange of secret data between the devices for which security can be achieved with audio steganography. Audio steganography is an efficient, reliable and low-latency mechanism used for securely communicating sensitive data over wireless links. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3's (MP3's) bit rate falls within the acceptable sound quality required for audio. Its low level of noise distortion does not affect its sound quality, which makes it a good carrier medium for steganography and watermarking. The strength of any embedding technique lies with its undetectability measure. Although there are many detection techniques available for both steganography and watermarking, the detection accuracy of secret data has been proven erroneous. It has yet to be confirmed whether different bit rates or a constant sampling rate for embedding eases detection. The accuracy of detecting hidden information in MP3 files drops with the influence of the compression rate or increases. This drop or increase is caused by either the increase in file track size, the sampling rate or the bit rate. This paper presents an experimental study that evaluates the detection accuracy of the secret data embedded in MP3. Training data were used for the embedding and detection of text messages in MP3 files. Several iterations were evaluated. The experimental results show that the used approach was effective in detecting the embedded data in MP3 files. An accuracy rate of 97.92% was recorded when detecting secret data in MP3 files under 128-kbps compression. This result outperformed the previous research work.