Stego-CIMA: a Lightweight Steganography-Based Framework for Secure IoT Communication

The vast growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has amplified the necessity of secure communication in resource limited settings, where conventional cryptographic mechanisms tend to be too computationally expensive.Stego-CIMA, a lightweight framework based on steganography, suggested in this paper, aims to secure IoT communication while keeping computational, as well as energy, overheads low.Stego-CIMA utilizes bit-level steganography, non-cryptographic hashing, and a trust-based fallback strategy to provide confidentiality, integrity, and mutual authentication.We measure efficiency through real-world implementations, tabulating its energy efficiency, its computational expense, as well as its resistance to common attacks, e.g., denial of service, man in the middle, replay, and desynchronization attacks.The results demonstrate Stego-CIMA's remarkable energy efficiency, adding only 6.77% overhead to ESPNOW, compared to 26.45% with conventional AES-128 encryption a 74.4% improvement over ESPNOW with AES-128 encryption, as well as achieving a 53.26% reduction in execution time compared to BLAP-SHS from 5.67 ms down to just 2.65 ms, along with its excellent resistance to attacks, our framework achieves a 98,5% message success rate under DoS attacks, 100% attack detection under MITM attacks, 100% rejection of replayed messages and a 98% recovery success rate under desynchronization attacks, finally the framework's security properties were formally validated using the formal symbolic verification tool scyther.These results put Stego-CIMA on a highly promising track to secure, as well as efficient, communication in IoT networks operating in a holistic resource-limited environment.