Enhanced Spatial Domain Image Steganography for Improved IoT Security and Privacy Applications

In today's interconnected world, ensuring robust security and privacy for IoT-enabled systems is essential due to the vulnerabilities introduced by the proliferation of IoT devices. Practical strategies, including data hiding for secure transmission, are crucial for protecting sensitive information and critical infrastructure. Addressing challenges such as device authentication and data access control is vital. As digital images become the most commonly used media in IoT applications, many practitioners prefer using them to secure confidential data transmission through steganography. To address data privacy issues in IoT applications, this paper introduces a novel steganography algorithm designed to minimize image distortion while optimizing the use of embeddable pixels in the cover image. The proposed method converts secret data into a simplified format and sorts the binary representations of secret bits in ascending order, reducing the size of the secret data and significantly decreasing the payload. Experimental results demonstrate that this method outperforms existing techniques, achieving a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 67.42 dB and an average Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.99, ensuring a high-quality stego image. This advancement is believed to significantly enhance the security and privacy of IoT data transmissions.