With the rapid development of information technology recently, information security has become the focus of public concern. Information Hiding (IH) technology is an effective method to tackle the problem of information leakage incidents. In this paper, a novel coverless information hiding method based on the Most Significant Bit (MSB) of cover image is proposed (CIHMSB). Firstly, the cover image is segmented into a number of fragments. Secondly, in order to use the MSB of cover image to represent the secret information, the average intensity of each fragment is calculated. Thirdly, a one-to-one mapping between the MSB of the image fragment and the secret information is established using the mapping sequence (denote as Km), decided by the sender and the receiver in advance. This process produces a mapping flag (denote as Kf), which is sent by the sender along with the stego image. The objective of the proposed work is to increase hiding capacity, curtail the distortion of the stego image to improve its quality and reduce the Bit Error Rate (BER) of stego image in the case of distortion. Experimental results show that the proposed method can conceal 2601 bits secret information per carrier with peak signal-tonoise ratio (P SN R) of ∞ dB. What's more, some stego image quality assessment parameters, such as structural similarity (SSIM) index and universal image quality index (Qi), are slightly better than existing information hiding methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has good performance against such as AGWN, salt & pepper noise, low-pass filtering and JPEG compression attacks.

Smart home is an emerging form of the Internet of things (IoT), which provides a convenient and comfortable living environment for the smart home users. With the explosive growth of smart home information, people pay more attention to the privacy protection of smart home, including the choice of privacy and effective privacy protection scheme. This paper proposes a privacy protection scheme based on information hiding, the scheme guarantees the sensitive data transmitted securely. First, the smart home Real-time sensor data are classified into sensitive data and non-sensitive data through machine learning, the process can be controlled according to the user's preferences. Second, the sensitive data can be transmitted securely by ordinary channels using method of combination encryption with information hiding. Experiment results show that this scheme can help users to express their preferences to the privacy protection, changing the previous practice that users can only accept the privacy settings provided by the supplier. What's more, the scheme combines encryption with information hiding, providing a double guarantee for the sensitive data during they are transmitted on ordinary channels. Comparing to the previous practice of using encryption merely, this scheme greatly improves the security of data transmission and is more suitable for the real environment. INDEX TERMS Smart home, privacy protection, data encryption, information hiding.

Smart home is an emerging form of the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling people to enjoy a convenient and intelligent life. The data generated by smart home devices are transmitted through the public channel, which is not secure enough, so the secret data in smart home are easily intercepted by malicious adversaries. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a smart home privacy protection method combining DES encryption and the improved Least Significant Bit (LSB) information hiding algorithm, changing the practice of directly exposing smart home secret information to the Internet, first, using Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption to encrypt the smart home information and second, the improved LSB information hiding algorithm is used to hide the ciphertext, so that the adversary cannot detect the smart home secret information. The goal of the scheme is to provide a double protection for the secure transmission of the smart home secret information. If an attacker wants to carry out an attack, it has to break through at least two defense lines, which seems impossible to do. Experiment results show that the improved LSB algorithm is more robust than the existing algorithms, and it is very safe. Therefore, the scheme proposed in this paper is very practical for protecting the smart home secret information.

No abstract