A HYBRID CRYPTOGRAPHY-STEGANOGRAPHY FRAMEWORK FOR SECURING IOT-GENERATED AGRICULTURAL DATA FROM SENSOR TO CLOUD

Abstract

Agriculture is an important part of the global economy and the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled agri-care devices has greatly improved the efficiency, accuracy and productivity of modern agriculture. These intelligent gadgets gather and send real-time data about soil moisture, crop conditions, weather forecasts and predictions, giving farmers and stakeholders the information they need to make informed decisions. But a number of cyber threats are threatening such agricultural information transmission and storage over the IoT network such as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM), cryptanalysis key management vulnerabilities and unauthorized data interception. In precision agriculture, where IoT devices are often resource-constrained with limited computational power, memory and energy, traditional security measures are often impractical, making the need for lightweight and powerful data protection solutions more critical than ever.To fill this, the current study suggests a lightweight hybrid security framework integrating cryptography and steganography to protect the sensitive data in the precision agriculture context in the IoT environment. The proposed solution selectively encrypts the information related to the crops and embeds it in cover images by Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Most Significant Bit (MSB) steganography technique, thus providing two layers of protection: the encrypting part ensures confidentiality, and the embedding in the cover image ensures that the sensitive information cannot be detected by the adversary. The selective encryption approach reduces the computational burden, making it appropriate for resource-limited IoT devices while maintaining the security strength of the system.The proposed framework has been thoroughly tested in terms of performance metrics such as encryption/decryption time Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and payload capacity to ensure enhanced security and image fidelity. Experimental results show that the hybrid approach has significantly improved data security reduced stego-image encryption time, and kept the stego-images' distortion level low, all confirming the success of this approach. A comparative analysis also reveals that the proposed method performs better than standard cryptographic/Steganographic methods on processing speed and against common attacks. The results confirm the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed hybrid cryptography–steganography approach as a secure, low overhead solution for the protection of sensitive agricultural information in real-world scenarios for IoT-enabled precision agriculture applications.