Perfect Performance Analysis of IoT Security scheme employing an Integrated Approach of Cryptography and Steganography

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the next phase of information revolution whose context involves billions of smart devices and sensors interconnected to facilitate speedy information and data exchange under soft real time constraints. IoT extends the ‘anywhere, anyhow, anytime‘computing and networking paradigm to ‘anything, anyone and any service‘. In this, a security scheme in IoT is analyzed where a fused approach of cryptography and steganography have been adopted. Two different steganographic schemes; Variable Least Significant Bit Substitution (VLSBS) and Most Significant Bit- Least Significant Bit (MSB-LSB) Substitution are analyzed using an experimental 2⁴ X 3 design (48 experiments). Further an extensive literature survey is conducted in the steganography domain, to get an idea about popular steganographic metrics widely employed nowadays. Some of these metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE) , Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC), Normalized Absolute Error (NAE), Average Difference (AD), Maximum Difference (MD), Structural Content (SC) etc have been analyzed for the aforesaid steganographic schemes for the purpose of comparative performance analysis. Further, it has been verified that the number of cover image pixels required for data embedding as well as number of altered cover image pixels is less in case of MSB-LSB scheme that implies its better performance as compared to its VLSBS counterpart. 

Introduction

The Internet has transformed into Internet of Things (IoT) propelled by the ever increasing and spectacular advancements conducted in the domain of mobile communications and wireless technologies. IoT refers to the next phase of information revolution whose context involves billions of smart devices and sensors interconnected to facilitate speedy information and data exchange under real time constraints. The phrase 'Things' refer to the inseperable mixture of hardware,software, data and services. IoT extends the 'anywhere, anyhow, anytime' computing and networking paradigm to 'anything, anyone and any service'. However, since IoT typically involves multitude of constrained devices i.e sensors with limited computing power, battery life, memory, storage constraints, it is highly vulnerable to attacks. Thus ensuring data security during information exchange phase is of paramount importance in IoT.

In this paper, two proposed security schemes in IoT are analyzed employing a merged approach of Cryptography and Steganography schemes mentioned in papers [Das17-Das16]. The goal here is to evaluate and examine the performance of the proposed security steganograhic schemes using various popular steganographic and performance metrics. 

Cryptography refers to the science of attaining security by encrypting messages to make them non-readable. The process of converting from the plaintext (original data) to ciphertext (coded data) is known as encryption while the reverse process is termed asdecryption. If the same key is utilized for both encryption and decryption then the cryptographic model is termed a Symmetric Cryptographymodel else Asymmetric Cryptography. In IoT lightweight Cryptography is desirable since IoT devices are constrained devices and lightweight schemes provide high efficiency for end-to- end communications as well as can be applied on low resource devices. 

Steganography, on the other hand, refers to 'covered or hidden writing'. The goal of this scheme is to hide the very existence of the message/data in a cover medium. Modern steganographic schemes employ various cover mediums like the audio, image,video, network/protocols etc to embed data securely and then transmit it over the network. Applications of Steganography exist primarily in secret communications, feature tagging, copyright protection etc.