The widespread use of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications has enormously increased the danger level of data leakage and theft in IoT as data transmission occurs through a public channel. As a result, the security of the IoT has become a serious challenge in the field of information security. Steganography on the network is a critical tool for preventing the leakage of private information and enabling secure and encrypted communication. The primary purpose of steganography is to conceal sensitive information in any form of media such as audio, video, text, or photos, and securely transfer it through wireless networks. In this paper, we analyse the performance characteristics of one of the steganography techniques called Hidden Communication System for Corrupted Networks (HCCNETs) for hiding sensitive data. This performance analysis includes the efficiency and the cost of the system in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), specifically in the IEEE 802.11ah IoT protocol. The analysis is mainly based on a two-dimensional Markov chain model in the presence of an error channel. Additionally, the model considers packet arrival rate, back-off timer freezing, back-off stages, and short retry limit to ensure compliance with IEEE 802.11ah requirements. It stresses the importance of taking these elements into consideration while modeling the efficiency and cost of the steganographic channel system. These parameters often result in a high precise channel access estimation, a more accurate and efficient accuracy measurements system, efficient channel utilisation, avoidance of throughput saturation overestimation, and ensuring that no packet is served endlessly. Evaluated results demonstrate that HCCNETs is an effective approach at low cost.
Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are widely used in a variety of applications such as healthcare, industrial control, identification technology, ubiquitous computing and military investigation, etc [
The authors in [
The work presented in this paper focuses on one of steganography techniques, called the Hidden Communication System for Corrupted Networks (HCCNETs) for hidden sensitive data. The significance of HCCNETs lies on the use of a protected communications network equipped with cryptographic techniques to offer a steganography system and suggestion of new protocol with bandwidth allocation on the basis of corrupted frames. The system’s primary innovation is the use of frames with intentionally erroneous checksums to create concealed communication. This study is an extension of the existing study in [
The rest of the paper is arranged as follows: Section 2 presents the model analysis including the frame transmission probability in the corrupted frame mode as well as the data transmission time analysis. Section 3 describes the cost analysis κ. Section 4 discusses efficiency analysis ε. Section 5 concludes the paper.
In this section, the medium access procedure for nodes is formulated using two-dimension Markov Chain, then the system’s throughput, efficiency and cost of IEEE 802.11ah communication are derived. In
Notations | Description | Notations | Description |
---|---|---|---|
Number of vehicles | Packet transmission probability | ||
Probability of packet collision transmission | Probability of at least one packet in the buffer | ||
Unavailability of ith packet transmissions in the buffer | Probability of frame error | ||
Bit error rate probability | Probability of ACK frame error rate | ||
Probability of data frame error rate | Data packet size | ||
Probability of idle channel, | Probability of successful packet transmission | ||
Probability of buy channel | Probability of transmitting a packet with collision | ||
Idle slot duration | Duration for successful packet transmission | ||
Duration for packet transmission with collision | Duration for transmitting a data packet unsuccessfully due to frame error | ||
Time duration of SIFS (Short Inter-Frame Space) | Time duration of EIFS (Extended Inter-frame Space) | ||
Propagation delay | The average duration of the logical time slot that might be spent per state considering state of an idle, a successful transmission, a collision or a frame error | ||
Duration of a transmission of an OFDM symbol in 802.11ah | OFDM PHY layer service field size | ||
OFDM PHY layer tail fields size | The number of encoded bites per one symbol | ||
CW | Contention window | Contention window size for a packet in the ith backoff stage |
As seen in
The first case in
The non-null transition probabilities in this case represent the absence of packet transmission in the buffer that is forwarded to the idle state
Whenever the repeat limit is reached, the maximum back-off phase m and CW size value are reset to the minimum levels as shown in the first case of
Assume that
Due to the chain regularities, for each
From
Since
Therefore, by applying the condition of stationary distribution normalisation,
We obtain
And:
Since we have
During transmission, the error frame probability
The probability of transmitting packets colliding is defined as follows:
We can calculate the packet transmission from
In this subsection, the system throughput of HCCNETs in the corrupted frame mode
Thus, the duration of the logical time slots
Eventually, the system throughput of HCCNETs in the corrupted frame mode
The cost
Assume that frame error rate increases with the fixed value △
Then, it is normalised to
Since the cost curves are derived on
The cost values for IEEE 802.11ah (ERP-OFDM) are shown in
ΔFER | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
0.01 | 0.02 | 0.03 | 0.04 | 0.05 | |
0 | 0.0081 |
0.0235 |
0.0302 |
0.0355 |
0.0414 |
0.0769 | 0.0081 |
0.0238 |
0.0302 |
0.0357 |
0.0417 |
0.5507 | 0.0091 |
0.0252 |
0.0322 |
0.0381 |
0.0452 |
ΔFER | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
0.01 | 0.02 | 0.03 | 0.04 | 0.05 | |
0 | 0.0088 |
0.0239 |
0.0311 |
0.0367 |
0.0432 |
0.0769 | 0.0091 |
0.0245 |
0.0312 |
0.0391 |
0.0436 |
0.5507 | 0.0098 |
0.0264 |
0.0339 |
0.0407 |
0.0461 |
The efficiency is defined as the
Since
Therefore
Eventually
And then normalize it to
As cost analysis, we analyse an IEEE 802.11ah (ERP-OFDM) when R = 6.5 Mbps, L = 1000 bytes frames,
n | ΔFER | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
0.01 | 0.02 | 0.03 | 0.04 | 0.05 | |
10 | 0.0089 |
0.0238 |
0.0308 |
0.0377 |
0.0446 |
20 | 0.0092 |
0.0254 |
0.0331 |
0.0399 |
0.0456 |
The cost relies on the frame error rate, while the efficiency relies only on the △
This paper introduces one of the steganographic techniques called HCCNETs to evaluate the performance efficiency and the cost of system usage of the steganographic channel over IEEE 802.11ah IoT protocol. We begin by analysing the IEEE 802.11ah protocol using a two-dimensional Markov chain model under unsaturated situations with an imperfect transmission channel. The analysis of the 802.11ah IoT protocol is used to determine the transmission probability, successful transmission probability, and collision probability. Then, using these derivatives formulas, performance metrics for throughput, efficiency, and cost of system usage in the network are expressed and calculated. The influence of the channel conditions and node number is examined in order to evaluate and understand the efficiency and the cost of system usage in HICCUPS over 802.11ah IoT protocol. The analytical findings indicate that HICCUPS steganographic technique is significantly efficient with reasonable cost.
Future study will concentrate on simulation analysis of HCCNETs over IoT scheme in order to analyse HCCNETs characteristics in a variety of situations and to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the security of HCCNETs.