High-Capacity Imperceptible Data Hiding Using Permutation-Based Embedding Process for IoT Security

The internet of things (IoT) has become a popular technology in communication which utilizes the concept of connecting things together and exchanges information through various networks. Since data can be transferred through a wide range of channels, IoT systems suffer from potential data leakages. One of the common ways to reduce such risks is to engage steganography with secret information during transmission. A novel scheme proposed in this paper exploits simple pixel permutations to embed secret data. Instead of handling pixel blocks, the proposed scheme maneuvers on pixels directly. The proposed scheme simply manipulates the sequenced pixels using two coefficients, a threshold of range for pixel values, and a specified clustering count to fulfill the two major requirements of effective data hiding. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme provides a satisfactory embedding capacity and preserves a high level of image visual quality. The overall performance of the proposed scheme demonstrates its high potential in IoT security.