Systematic evaluation of hybrid steganography approach towards secure communication in IoT

The proliferation of real-world internet connectivity has led to a convergence of a large number of people accessing common cloud facilities. While this has facilitated increased data sharing in the cloud, it has also raised concerns regarding data privacy and security. It is crucial for both cloud service providers and users to ensure the security of data in all aspects. However, the development of weighted algorithms aimed at enhancing security often leads to increased latency and degradation of cloud performance. The system presented in this study addresses the challenges of creating a secure environment and evaluates a proposed framework using hybrid steganography. In this system, the cover image, input data, and a uniquely generated secret key are considered for hybridization. The embedded image undergoes the Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) algorithm for steganography, followed by the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) process for image transformation before being communicated over the channel. At the receiving end, the reverse process is executed to extract the original information, contingent upon the correlation with the secret key. The proposed approach achieves an MSE (Mean Squared Error) of -0.52141 and a PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of 48 dB, demonstrating improved performance compared to existing approaches.