A blind source separation based method for speech encryption

The underdetermined problem poses a significant challenge in blind source separation (BSS) where the number of the source signals is greater than that of the mixed signals. Motivated by the fact that the security of many cryptosystems relies on the apparent intractability of the computational problems such as the integer factorization problem, we exploit the intractability of the underdetermined BSS problem to present a novel BSS-based speech encryption by properly constructing the underdetermined mixing matrix for encryption, and by generating the key signals that satisfy the necessary condition for the proposed method to be unconditionally secure. Both extensive computer simulations and performance analyses results show that the proposed method has high level of security while retaining excellent audio quality. Index Terms--Blind source separation (BSS), independent component analysis (ICA), speech encryption.