Securing Data in Iot Using Cryptography and Steganography
Securing Data in Iot Using Cryptography and Steganography
Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) is a domain wherein which Constraints of the IoT include energy budget, connectivity, and
the transfer of data is taking place every single second. The computational power [2].
security of these data is a challenging task; however, security Although IoT devices have made life easier, little atten-
challenges can be mitigated with cryptography and steganog-
raphy techniques. These techniques are crucial when dealing tion has been given to the security of these devices. Currently,
with user authentication and data privacy. In the proposed the focus of developers is to increase the capabilities of these
work, the elliptic Galois cryptography protocol is introduced devices, with little emphasis on the security of the devices. The
and discussed. In this protocol, a cryptography technique is used data that is transferred over the IoT network is vulnerable to
to encrypt confidential data that came from different medical attack. This data is needed to be secured to protect the privacy
sources. Next, a Matrix XOR encoding steganography technique
is used to embed the encrypted data into a low complexity of the user. If there is no data security, then there is a possibil-
image. The proposed work also uses an optimization algorithm ity of data breach and thus, personal information can be easily
called Adaptive Firefly to optimize the selection of cover blocks hacked from the system. Some of the important concepts of
within the image. Based on the results, various parameters are IoT involve identification and authentication. These concepts
evaluated and compared with the existing techniques. Finally, are inter-related to each other as cryptographic functions that
the data that is hidden in the image is recovered and is then
decrypted. are necessary to ensure that the information is communicated
to the correct device and if the source is trusted or not. With
Index Terms—Confidential data, cryptography, data security, the lack of authentication, a hacker can easily communicate
Internet of Things (IoT), steganography, user authentication.
to any device.
Whenever two devices communicate with each other, there
is a transfer of data between them. The data can also be very
sensitive and personal. Therefore, when this sensitive data is
I. I NTRODUCTION moving from device to device over the IoT network, then there
HE INTERNET of Things (IoT) is a network of
T connected vehicles, physical devices, software, and elec-
tronic items that facilitate data exchange. The purpose of IoT
is a need for encryption of the data. Encryption also helps to
protect data from intruders. The data can be easily encrypted
with the help of cryptography, which is the process of convert-
is to provide the IT-infrastructure for the secure and reliable ing simple text into unintelligible text. The primary objectives
exchange of “Things” [1]. The foundation of IoT mainly con- of cryptography are confidentiality, integrity, nonrepudiation,
sists of the integration of sensors/actuators, radio frequency and authentication. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one
identification (RFID) tags, and communication technologies. of the cryptographic algorithms that is used in the proposed
The IoT explains how a variety of physical items and devices work. ECC is a public key cryptographic technique based on
can be integrated with the Internet to permit those objects to the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields.
cooperate and communicate with each other to reach common In addition, to the cryptographic techniques, another
goals. The IoT consists mostly of little materials that are asso- method, named steganography is used in the proposed work
ciated together to facilitate collaborative calculating situations. which helps to provide additional security to the data.
Steganography hides encrypted messages in such a way that no
Manuscript received July 22, 2018; revised October 16, 2018; accepted one would even suspect that an encrypted message even exists
February 20, 2019. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor Y. Yuan.
(Corresponding author: Amir H. Gandomi.) in the first place. In modern digital steganography, encryp-
M. Khari, A. K. Garg, and R. Gupta are with the Department of tion of data occurs using typical cryptographic techniques.
CSE, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technology and Next, a special algorithm helps to insert the data into redun-
Research, New Delhi 110031, India (e-mail: manjukhari@yahoo.co.in;
adityagarg2607@gmail.com; rashmig71@yahoo.com). dant data that is part of a file format, such as a JPEG image.
A. H. Gandomi is with the Analytics and Information Systems, School of The proposed work uses Matrix XOR steganography to pro-
Business, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA (e-mail: vide additional security. The image block is optimized with
a.h.gandomi@stevens.edu).
R. Patan and B. Balusamy are with the School of Computing Science the help of Adaptive Firefly algorithm in which the encrypted
and Engineering, Galgotias University, Greater Noida 201310, India (e-mail: data is hidden in a selected block from a huge image block.
prizwan5@gmail.com; kadavulai@gmail.com). The remaining part of this paper is organized as follows.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Section II discussed work that relates to the security of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSMC.2019.2903785 IoT communication. Section III proposes methodology for
2168-2216 c 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
improvements in medical data security. Section IV describes 2) break-glass access. In standard situations, a medical worker
the experimental setup and results. Section V concludes can decrypt and access data if the attribute set satisfies the
this paper. access policy of a medical file. In an emergency, a break-glass
access mechanism is used that can bypass the access policy
of the medical file so that emergency medical care workers or
II. R ELATED W ORK rescue workers can access the data in a timely fashion.
This section presents an overview of existing studies of Safety and confidentiality of information sent over the IoT
healthcare data security within the IoT network. network is a priority for the healthcare and medical indus-
Daniels et al. [3] introduced security microvisor (SμV) tries. Bairagi et al. [11] developed three methods for hiding
middleware, which uses software virtualization and assem- information so that communication over the IoT network can
bly level code verification to provide memory isolation and be preserved with the help of steganography. Information is
custom security. Banerjee et al. [4] presented energy-efficient hidden in the deepest layer of the image with the help of
datagram transport layer security (eeDTLS), which is a low- minimal distortion in the least significant bit (LSB) and the
energy variant of datagram transport layer security (DTLS) sign of the information can also be utilized. This technique
that had the same security strength but a lower energy improved imperceptibility and ability when compared to the
requirement. actual method.
Manogaran et al. [5] proposed a system in which medi- Huang et al. [12] presented a steganography scheme that
cal sensor devices are embedded in the human body to collect employs vector quantization (VQ) transformation in which
clinical measurements of patients. Significant changes in respi- LSB embeds secret data into a cover image. In the first
ratory rate, blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar, and body level, the pixels of a 4 × 4 VQ-transformed image block are
temperature that exceed standard levels are detected by the separated into two different groups: 1) the LSB group and
sensors, which generate an alert message containing relevant 2) the secret data group. In the second level, VQ indexes are
health information that is sent to the doctor, with the help embedded in the LSB group and secret data are embedded in
of a wireless network. This system uses a vital management the secret group. Shanableh et al. [13] proposed the flexible
security mechanism to protect large amounts of data in the macro-block ordering (FMO) feature of H.264/AVC to hide
industry. message bits. The macroblocks are assigned to arbitrary slice
There is an urgent need for the securing the data that is groups with reference to the content of the message bits to be
transmitted every second over the IoT network. Some of the hidden. In the proposed method, a maximum payload of three
existing studies for data security are shown below. message bits per macroblock is achieved.
Sun et al. [6] proposed CloudEyes, a cloud-based anti- Liao et al. [14] proposed a new medical JPEG image
malware system. The proposed system provided efficient and steganographic scheme that is based on the dependencies of
trusted security services to the devices in the IoT network. interblock coefficients. The basic strategy that is used in this
Ukil et al. [2] studied the requirements of embedded security, paper consists of preserving the differences among discrete
provided methods and solutions for resisting cyber-attacks, cosine transform (DCT) coefficients at the same position in
and provided technology for tamper proofing the embedded adjacent DCT blocks as much as possible.
devices based on the concept of trusted computing. The development of IoT was related to the security of
Chervyakov et al. [7] provided a data storage scheme for end-user’s privacy and communication. However, the techni-
the least probability of data redundancy, data loss, and the cal heterogeneity, materials, and asymmetric nature of com-
speed of encoding and decoding, that can cope with differ- munication between the Internet and sensor nodes created
ent objective preferences, workloads, and storage properties. challenging security issues.
This analysis showed that if the selection of redundant residue
number system (RRNS) parameters is accurate, then it not
only allows increased safety and reliability but it also helps
III. P ROPOSED A PPROACH
to increase the speed of processing the encrypted data. The
applications used on IoT platforms generally require more A. Elliptic Galois Cryptography and Steganography Protocol
data than traditional applications. Raza et al. [8] presented This paper proposes the elliptic Galois cryptography (EGC)
lightweight secure CoAP for the IoT (Lithe), which helped protocol for protection against data infiltration during trans-
in the development of a novel DTLS header compression mission over the IoT network. In the proposed work, different
scheme designed to reduce energy consumption with the help devices in the IoT network transmit data through the proposed
of 6LoWPAN. Moreover, security is not compromised with the protocol as a part of the controller. The encrypted algorithm
DTLS header compression scheme. Vučinić et al. [9] proposed within the controller encrypts the data using the EGC proto-
object security architecture (OSCAR), which is the architec- col and then the encrypted and secured message is hidden
ture for end-to-end security in the IoT. OSCAR is based on the in layers of the image, with help from the steganography
concept that the security of an object is related to the security technique. The image can then be easily transferred throughout
of the application payload. the Internet such that an intruder cannot extract the message
Yang et al. [10] proposed the lightweight break-glass hidden inside the image. Initially, the EGC technique encrypts
access control (LiBAC) system in which medical files can confidential data. Subsequently, the encoded secret message
be encrypted in two ways: 1) attribute-based access and is inserted within the image by the XOR steganography
This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
KHARI et al.: SECURING DATA IN IoT USING CRYPTOGRAPHY AND STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES 3
dj is the bias function, Wj is the weight factor, and dj is the where the binary data bit is D and C is the binary image
input function. bit block. Two conditions must be satisfied to carry out this
Step 5: The cipher text is generated, based on the weight embedding process.
factor and the input function Condition 1: For the two blocks, if the XOR operation results
in a zero, then there is no requirement to change the last bit
g(i) = xn (n) × (1 − yn ) + dj . (7)
position.
In the above equation, (xn , yn ) are the points on the elliptic Condition 2: For the two blocks, if the XOR operation does
curve (secret key). After creation of the cipher text, this text not result in zero, then there is a change of the cover block
is stored on a cloud platform with the help of the Matrix XOR (i.e., zero to one or one to zero).
Encoding steganography technique. After deciding the bit position for the cover block, the
b) Matrix XOR: Matrix XOR is a technique for hid- embedding process is executed based on the following
ing encrypted data in which the encrypted data is hidden equation:
inside the H.264 video file [16]. For this technique, the Firefly
KHARI et al.: SECURING DATA IN IoT USING CRYPTOGRAPHY AND STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES 5
β(r) = β0 e−γ c ;
k
k≥1 (12)
where β0 is defined as attraction per c = 0 and γ is defined as
the illuminated saturation immersion coefficient. γ = [0, ∞]
and γ = 1. In certain circumstances, β0 is expressed as β0 = 1
and k = 2 since most fireflies are visible due to a constrained
separation. (a)
Suppose that, for two fireflies i and j, room arrangement is n-
dimensional. The distance between the xi and yi , the individual
count can be create using Cartesian (c) count calculation, as
follows:
d
2
c=
x −x + y −y . (13)
j i i j
k=1
KHARI et al.: SECURING DATA IN IoT USING CRYPTOGRAPHY AND STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES 7
Amir H. Gandomi (SM’19) received the Ph.D. Rizwan Patan received the B.Tech. and M.Tech.
degree in engineering from the University of Akron, degrees in computer science and engineering
Akron, OH, USA, in 2015. from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University
He used to be a Lecturer in several univer- Anantapur, Anantapur, India, in 2012 and 2014,
sities. He was a Distinguished Research Fellow respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer
in headquarter of BEACON NSF Center located science and engineering from the School of
at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute
USA. He is an Assistant Professor of Analytics and of Technology, Vellore, India, in 2017.
Information Systems with the School of Business, He is an Assistant Professor with the School
Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA. of Computing Science and Engineering, Galgotias
He has published over 130 journal papers and four University, Greater Noida, India. He has published
books. Some of those publications are now among the hottest papers in the reputed 8 SCI journals and 20 free Scopus indexed journals, and also presented
field and collectively have been cited over 11 000 times with an H-index paper in National/International Conferences, published book chapters in CRC
of 53. He has been named as Highly Cited Researcher (top 1%) for two Press, IGI Global, Elsevier, and edited as books. He has two Indian patents.
consecutive years, 2017 and 2018, and One of the World’s Most Influential Dr. Patan is a Guest Editor of the International Journal of Grid and
Scientific Minds. He is currently ranked 19th in GP bibliography among over Utility Computing (Inderscience), Recent Patents on Computer Science, and
11 000 researchers. He is part of a NASA Technology cluster on big data, arti- Information Medical Unlock (Elsevier).
ficial intelligence, and machine learning. His current research interests include
global optimization and (big) data mining using machine learning and evolu-
tionary computations in particular.
Dr. Gandomi has also served as an Associate Editor, an Editor, and a Guest
Editor in several prestigious journals and has delivered several keynote/invited
talks.