IoT Security Using Steganography

I Introduction

In recent times IoT plays an important and crucial part in the domain of information and communication technology. Internet Of Things is a scheme of dissimilar components which are linked over internet and each having unique identifier. These connected devices or ‘things’ which are also called the smart objects(ex IP cameras) are implanted with different software and sensors having computing ability those are able to collect and exchange data without human interference with other devices or systems over the internet. The number of such connected devices is increasing every day and there is an estimation that the number would exceed 25 million within a year. These devices include medical devices, household appliances, smart TVs, IP cameras, vehicles, electric meters and controls, traffic controls, street lights as well as digital assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. The connectivity of these devices now not only restricted to the traditional end users such as mainframes, desktops and laptops but also expanded to hand hold smart phones and tablets. As a result use of these IoT devices has enormously increased in our daily life and that’s why there is an enhanced requirement to scrutiny the security issues of IoT devices. It is really a very challenging task to maintain the data security in IoT. It should not be neglected specially in case of home appliances, smart televisions, IP cameras, remote health monitoring etc where there is a lack of confidentiality and could be easily hacked (Atamli & Martin, 2014). Due to the significant improvement of computing facility several vulnerabilities and threats have occurred for IoT devices which led to implement strong security systems for them.From the security threats of view IOT devices were amongst the top five in 2015 (Bradley, 2015). However, IoT devices have the limitations of having lower battery capacity, less computing power and less memory. Due to this resource constrained environment, traditional strong cryptographic models would not work for it. Lightweight cryptographic models may be a solution. Researchers are still looking for alternative solutions. It is found that Steganography may be a good solution for specific IoT applications. The main focus of this section is to investigate the different ways to achieve security in IoT devices using Steganography.