Biblio

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.

Authentication is a process that provides access control of any type of computing applications by inspecting the user's identification with the database of authorized users. Passwords play the vital role in authentication mechanism to ensure the privacy of the information and avert from the illicit access. Password based authentication mechanism suffers from many password attacks such as shoulder surfing, brute forcing and dictionary attacks that crack the password of authentication schema by the adversary. Key Stroke technique, Click Pattern technique, Graphichical Password technique and Authentication panel are the several authentication techniques used to resist the password attacks in the literature. This research study critically reviews the types of password attacks and proposes a matrix based secure authentication mechanism which includes three phases namely, User generation phase, Matrix generation phase and Authentication phase to resist the existing password attacks. The performance measure of the proposed method investigates the results in terms existing password attacks and shows the good resistance to password attacks in any type of computing applications.