Audio scrambling technique based on cellular automata

Scrambling is a process that has proved to be very effective in increasing the quality of data hiding, watermarking, and encryption applications. Cellular automata are used in diverse and numerous applications because of their ability to obtain complex global behavior from simple and localized rules. In this paper we apply cellular automata in the field of audio scrambling because of the potential it holds in breaking the correlation between audio samples effectively. We also analyze the effect of using different cellular automata types on audio scrambling and we test different cellular automata rules with different Lambda values. The scrambling degree is measured and the relation between the robustness and the scrambling degree obtained is studied. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is robust to data loss attack where 1/3 of the data is lost and that the algorithm can be applied to music and speech files of different sizes.