Secure Electronic Commerce Transactions Using Pythagorean Triple-based Cryptography and Audio Steganography

Abstract

The rapidly increasing utilization of Information Technology (IT) in electronic commerce and other aspects of human existence has led to a rise in worries about the privacy and safe-ty/security of those involved. Due to the alarmingly high frequency with which data or user privacy breaches occur today, conducting online transactions can represent a major threat to buyers (and even business owners') privacy. Existing solutions to these security issues are still vulnerable to classic phishing scams. As a result, the construction of a robust and effi-cient audio steganography system for secure electronic commerce transactions is presented in this work. The developed system first encrypts sensitive financial data using the Pythagorean Triple-based Cryptographic (PTC) algorithm, then compresses the resulting cipher-text using the Lempel Ziv Welch (LZW) and Huffman's Compression Algorithms, and finally embeds the compressed file (using one-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)) in a suitable audio-file cover to produce an output (stego file) that is indistinguishable from the cover file. This output can then be exchanged between communicating entities across open networks. The new system has a little or no alteration in its outputs, as evidenced by the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), in the experimental results gotten.