End-to-End Channel Assurance for Communication over Open Voice Channels

Voice channels are commonly utilized in a wide variety of communication and control scenarios that span the gamut of applications ranging from military and commercial aviation to emergency response applications. Often the existing equipment for these applications utilizes openly accessible voice communication systems that offer no assurance of data security or integrity. It is possible to secure the systems with encryption but this would require significant new investments and introduce interoperability problems with existing equipment. As an alternative, we propose an in-band methodology for end-to-end channel assurance in these scenarios based on speech watermarking. Our speech watermark is resilient to low-bit rate coding standards commonly used in these voice communication applications and in mobile telephony and digital voice-over-IP (VoIP).