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Secure Communication Using Steganography in IoT Environment

IoT is an emerging technology in modern world of communication. As the usage of IoT devices is increasing in day to day life, the secure data communication in IoT environment is the major challenge. Especially, small sized Single-Board Computers (SBCs) or Microcontrollers devices are widely used to transfer data with another in IoT. Due to the less processing power and storage capabilities, the data acquired from these devices must be transferred very securely in order to avoid some ethical issues. There are many cryptography approaches are applied to transfer data between IoT devices, but there are obvious chances to suspect encrypted messages by eavesdroppers. To add more secure data transfer, steganography mechanism is used to avoid the chances of suspicion as another layer of security. Based on the capabilities of IoT devices, low complexity images are used to hide the data with different hiding algorithms. In this research study, the secret data is encoded through QR code and embedded in low complexity cover images by applying image to image hiding fashion. The encoded image is sent to the receiving device via the network. The receiving device extracts the QR code from image using secret key then decoded the original data. The performance measure of the system is evaluated by the image quality parameters mainly Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Coefficient (NC) and Security with maintaining the quality of contemporary IoT system. Thus, the proposed method hides the precious information within an image using the properties of QR code and sending it without any suspicion to attacker and competes with the existing methods in terms of providing more secure communication between Microcontroller devices in IoT environment.