Lightweight Proactive Moving-target Defense for Secure Data Exchange in IoT Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) revolutionizes cutting-edge technologies by enabling smart sensing, and actuation of the physical world. IoT enables cooperation between numerous heterogeneous smart devices to exchange and aggregate data from the surrounding environment through the internet. Recently, the range of IoT technology could be utilized in the real world by the rapid spread of sensor devices. These capabilities open the door for vital challenges. Security is the major challenge that faces the IoT networks. Traditional solutions cannot tackle smart and powerful attackers. Moving Target Defense (MTD) deploys mechanisms and strategies that increase attackers' uncertainty and frustrate their attempt to eavesdrop the target to be protected. In addition, Steganography is the practice of concealing a message within another message. For security proposes, Steganography is used to hide significant data within any transmitted messages, such as images, videos, and text files. This paper presents Stegano-MTD framework that enables combination between MTD mechanisms with steganography. This combination offers a lightweight solution that can be implemented on the IoT network. Stegano-MTD slices the message into small labeled chunks and sends them randomly through the network's nodes. Steganography is used for hide the key file that used to reconstruct the original data. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the presented solution.