A crypto-steganography scheme for IoT applications based on bit interchange and crypto-system

Abstract

Image steganography and cryptography have been used widely due to the dramatic evolution of the internet of things (IoT) and the simplicity of capturing and transferring digital images. Pressing challenges in the context of a steganography system include security, imperceptibility, and capacity issues. In the existing schemes, fixing one issue has been indicated to affect the other and vice versa. Based on the above challenges, a new scheme has been proposed for the Crypt-steganography scheme. The proposed scheme consists of three main contributions. The first contribution is hybrid additive cryptography (HAC), which is related to encrypting secret messages before the embedding process to ensure security. The HAC depends on ElGamal elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) with cubic Bézier curve to achieve text confidentiality. The second contribution is a bit interchange method (BIGM), which is related to the embedding process and solves the image's imperceptibility. The third contribution is a new image partitioning method (IPM). The IPM contribution increases the randomization of selecting the embedding pixels. The IPM proposes a random pixel selection based on three iterations of the Hénon Map function used with IPM. Different parameters are used to evaluate the proposed scheme. Based on the findings, the proposed scheme gives evidence to overcome existing challenges.

Evaluating the Merits and Constraints of Cryptography-Steganography Fusion: A Systematic Analysis

“…Another notable observation is the surge in articles focusing on a specific technology in 2022. However, the applications discussed in these articles ( [7,36,87,91]) seem unrelated, making it challenging to identify any underlying reason behind this trend. Furthermore, an attempt was made to employ the VOSviewer 13 tool to identify any authorship overlap among the identified journal articles.…”

“…Journal Articles Image [88], [76], [57], [62], [89], [22], [42], [45], [13], [49], [86], [87], [9], [7], [33], [36], [1], [10], [19], [5] Signal [34], [91] Audio [14] Hardware [79] Based on these findings, it is evident that there is a need to diversify research in terms of methods and cover mediums. Attention should be given to addressing security challenges in government applications, while a more comprehensive assessment of the performance of chaotic algorithms in medical domains is required.…”

“…This approach allows for more targeted performance improvements. Interestingly, among the seven articles exploring applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), three articles [7,22,34] do not utilize time-based analysis metrics. This omission makes it challenging to accurately assess the performance and efficiency of their proposed applications.…”

“…In such cases, imperceptibility may also be of lesser relevance. Out of the 24 articles analyzed, capacity is evaluated in 9 articles [5,7,9,13,42,62,76,86,87], either in comparison to other implementations or by examining different parameters within the same implementation. It is worth noting that only one article ( [7]) focusing on IoT applications specifically analyzed the capacity of the employed steganographic method.…”

“…While cryptography finds extensive usage in various everyday applications, both techniques have their respective domains of application and can potentially be combined for enhanced security measures. Steganography encompasses a wide range of techniques and can be applied in different forms, such as images, audio, video, and text, to many applications, for example, IoT communication [7,21,40], military [72], cloud storage [2,18,47,68], and more [28,31,32,38,90,95]. The growth of interest in steganography was sparked in two ways: the multimedia industry could greatly benefit from possible water-marking techniques, and restrictions on cryptographic schemes by governments triggered interest in alternative ways for communication to stay secretive [8].…”