Securing IoT Communication: A Steganographic Protocol for Efficient Mutual Authentication and Data Integrity

In the rapidly expanding domain of the Internet of Things (IoT), securing communication channels is paramount. This paper introduces a novel protocol that efficiently ensures mutual authentication and data integrity with minimal resource expenditure. Unlike traditional methods, which often require multiple message exchanges and computationally intensive cryptographic operations, our protocol achieves both objectives within only two exchanges. Leveraging steganography and non-cryptographic hash functions, the protocol embeds authentication data within the data payload itself, thus obviating the need for separate authentication phases and significantly reducing the system’s vulnerability to common cyber threats such as Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) and replay attacks. Our approach employs a dual-functionality strategy that simultaneously verifies data integrity during the authentication process, enhancing the security of IoT communications. A comparative analysis with existing solutions, highlights our protocol’s superior efficiency and lower operational costs. The use of indexed, non-repetitive key pairs and steganographic concealment ensures that security does not come at the expense of performance, making the protocol particularly suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. This paper’s results indicate that our protocol not only meets the stringent security demands of IoT ecosystems but does so while respecting the critical need for energy and computational efficiency. By streamlining the number of message exchanges and employing low-cost hash functions, the protocol sets a new standard for secure IoT communications, paving the way for its widespread adoption in next-generation IoT applications.