Asymmetric Phase Coding Audio Watermarking

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Asymmetric Phase Coding Audio Watermarking Guang Yang, Amir Ghasemian, Ninareh Mehrabi, Homa Hosseinmardi The proliferation of deepfake audio challenges voice-based authentication systems; passive forensic detectors are sensitive to evolving generative models and to real-world channel distortions. We propose Asymmetric Phase Coding (APC), a training-free cryptographic signing layer for audio, designed as a compact and auditable provenance primitive that can stand alone or be stacked with learned watermarks. APC combines Ed25519 digital signatures (EdDSA, FIPS 186-5; 64-byte signatures) with Reed-Solomon error correction, pseudo-random STFT phase-bin selection, and a redundant quantization-index-modulation (QIM) code on log-magnitude differences of adjacent bin pairs, yielding a compact, non-repudiable, blind-extractable watermark. We evaluate APC on 1,000 LibriSpeech test-clean clips (10 s each, 44.1 kHz) under eight attack configurations -- identity, 10% end-cropping, 20% end-cropping, 8 kHz low-pass, 16 kHz round-trip resampling, FLAC re-encoding, MP3 at 128 kbps, and OGG-Vorbis at 128 kbps -- and achieve cryptographic verification rates between 97.5% and 98.3% on every condition at mean PESQ=3.02 and tens-of-milliseconds CPU latency. We explicitly compare APC against recent neural baselines (AudioSeal, WavMark, SilentCipher), detail the threat model (forgery resistance vs. erasure), characterize the dataset, define all metrics, quantify an adaptive white-box erasure attack, and release code, keys, and metadata for reproducibility. Comments: 13 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) Cite as: arXiv:2605.07241 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.07241v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.07241 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Guang Yang [view email] [v1] Fri, 8 May 2026 04:54:59 UTC (2,382 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs eess eess.AS References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)