Abstract: Modern audio processing techniques have made it pretty easy to make modifications like tampering, replace-ment, rearranging etc to audio content and time sectuence. It is more and more important to ascertain the integrity and authenticity of audio data. In toms of human auditory system, audio authentication aims to protect audio content rather than bit stream itself , this way, it should sustain some common signal manipulations that can maintain audio perceptual quality or semantic meaning while leaving authentication detector untriggered. This paper gave a vision on the back-ground, representative application scenarios and properties of audio content authentication, characterized hard authenti-cation and soft authentication, differentiated content preserving and malicious manipulations, and summarized most state-of-the-art audio content authentication algorithms published in the literature. Several technical characteristics in this research field were concluded and discussed, possible solutions were also pointed out for future research.

Key words: Audio content authentication,Content-preserving processing,Malicious processing,Resynchronization