UNDERWATER MASKED CARRIER ACOUSTIC COMMUNICATION: MODELING AND ANALYSIS

Abstract

As naval warfighting capabilities evolve, the need for innovative communication techniques for tactics and command and control increases. Using Navy sonar systems normally reserved for conventional communication in the underwater channel between vessels to transmit a hidden message disguised as ambient ocean noises or biological noise is a possible way to communicate with a low probability of interception or detection.

This research applies information hiding via steganography in order to embed and extract bits from an audio file after transmission through a simulated underwater acoustic channel. Specifically, we explore a technique which allows us to communicate such that the transmission appears native to the operating environment. We do this by embedding symbols in an audio source in the frequency domain. We demonstrate the success of our technique via traditional steganography metrics and describe its performance limitations. We find that our scheme can be both imperceptible and robust provided that proper embedding and transmission parameters can be determined.