A Crypto-Steganography Approach for Hiding Ransomware within HEVC Streams in Android IoT Devices.

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Information Hiding
• Digital Forensics

Background:

• Steganography is crucial for data confidentiality, especially for IoT data, which can be benign or malicious like ransomware.
• Existing steganography methods may lack robust security or imperceptibility when hiding sensitive data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a hybrid crypto-steganography approach for hiding ransomware within high-resolution video frames.
• To enhance the security and imperceptibility of hidden data compared to traditional methods.

Main Methods:

• Hybridizing Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for encryption and Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography for embedding.
• Encrypting Android ransomware data with AES, then embedding it into HEVC video frames using random pixel selection (RPS).
• Evaluating performance using objective and subjective quality assessment metrics with varying ransomware sizes and video resolutions.

Main Results:

• The hybrid approach demonstrated superior efficiency in maintaining ransomware data integrity and ensuring high imperceptibility of stego video frames.
• Achieved multi-level security through AES encryption and LSB steganography with random pixel embedding.
• Successfully extracted the hidden ransomware data and passed antivirus scans from 70 engines without detection.

Conclusions:

• The proposed hybrid crypto-steganography method offers a robust solution for secure ransomware hiding in videos.
• It provides strong data confidentiality, integrity, and imperceptibility while evading security detection.
• The approach is effective for both defensive and offensive cybersecurity applications.