A Multilayered Audio Signal Encryption Approach for Secure Voice Communication

In this paper, multilayer cryptosystems for encrypting audio communications are proposed. These cryptosystems combine audio signals with other active concealing signals, such as speech signals, by continuously fusing the audio signal with a speech signal without silent periods. The goal of these cryptosystems is to prevent unauthorized parties from listening to encrypted audio communications. Preprocessing is performed on both the speech signal and the audio signal before they are combined, as this is necessary to get the signals ready for fusion. Instead of encoding and decoding methods, the cryptosystems rely on the values of audio samples, which allows for saving time while increasing their resistance to hackers and environments with a noisy background. The main feature of the proposed approach is to consider three levels of encryption namely fusion, substitution, and permutation where various combinations are considered. The resulting cryptosystems are compared to the one-dimensional logistic map-based encryption techniques and other state-of-the-art methods. The performance of the suggested cryptosystems is evaluated by the use of the histogram, structural similarity index, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), log-likelihood ratio, spectrum distortion, and correlation coefficient in simulated testing. A comparative analysis in relation to the encryption of logistic maps is given. This research demonstrates that increasing the level of encryption results in increased security. It is obvious that the proposed salting-based encryption method and the multilayer DCT/DST cryptosystem offer better levels of security as they attain the lowest SNR values, −25 dB and −2.5 dB, respectively. In terms of the used evaluation metrics, the proposed multilayer cryptosystem achieved the best results in discrete cosine transform and discrete sine transform, demonstrating a very promising performance.