Integration of lightweight cryptography and watermarking with compression for high speed and reliable communication of digital images in IoT

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown rapidly over the past few years. The main challenges for people who design and make these systems are to make them use less energy and use as small hardware as possible. Recording and sending compressed images in IoT systems must be secure. Secure image transmission requires encryption, watermarking, and compression. In choosing these algorithms, one should always consider energy efficiency and low hardware complexity. So, we propose a secure way to send data in IoT systems by combining encryption, watermarking, and compression. Depending on what is needed, we use a lightweight encryption algorithm, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) watermarking, and Discrete cosine transform + Lempel‐Ziv‐Welch (DCT+LZW) compression. In this method, the main contribution is to make a security pack that is small, strong, and easy to implement for secure image transmission on IoT systems. In the experiments, several images are used to judge how well the proposed integrated method works and how well it compares to other methods. When the proposed method was compared to other methods, the peak signal‐to‐noise ratio (PSNR) parameter improved by more than 20% in the Lena image and by more than 11% in the Baboon image.