Lightweight DWT Steganography With ECC ChaCha20 for Secure Medical IoT Systems

In the evolving landscape of Medical Internet of Things (MIoT), the secure transmission and storage of sensitive patient data remain critical challenges. Traditional cryptographic and steganographic methods often fail to achieve an optimal balance between data security, embedding capacity, and computational efficiency. This project, titled “Lightweight DWT Steganography with ECC-ChaCha20 for Secure Medical IoT Systems,” presents a hybrid lightweight security framework that integrates Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)-based steganography, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and the ChaCha20 stream cipher. The DWT technique is employed to embed medical data efficiently within medical images by exploiting the frequency domain, ensuring high imperceptibility and robustness against statistical attacks. ECC is utilized for asymmetric key generation and exchange due to its low computational overhead and strong encryption capability, making it suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. ChaCha20 provides rapid symmetric encryption with enhanced resistance to timing and side-channel attacks. The combination of ECC and ChaCha20 enhances confidentiality and integrity, while DWT ensures covert data embedding without compromising diagnostic image quality. The proposed model is lightweight, energy-efficient, and resistant to eavesdropping, replay, and steganalysis attacks. It aims to establish a secure, privacy-preserving communication pipeline for medical IoT ecosystems, thereby ensuring trusted data exchange between sensors, gateways, and healthcare servers in real-time environments.

Keywords: DWT, Steganography, ECC, ChaCha20, Medical IoT, Cryptography, Security, Lightweight, Confidentiality, Data Hiding.