Abstract- In today’s digital world, a large amount of sensitive information is shared through communication systems. However, even with existing protection methods, certain patterns in data transmission can still be identified and misused by attackers. To address this issue, this work proposes a two-stage security approach where encryption and data hiding are combined rather than treated as separate processes. In this system, the data is first encrypted using the SM4 block cipher and then embedded into a carrier image, making the information less noticeable during transmission. An additional processing layer is introduced to further enhance security, resulting in multiple levels of protection against unauthorized access. For secure key management, Zigbee communication is used along with an ESP32 microcontroller to enable local key transfer. At the same time, IoT integration allows keys to be delivered in real time through Telegram, ensuring both flexibility and security. The overall system is implemented using Python for encryption and steganography, supported by hardware-based key transmission. The results show that the proposed method improves confidentiality and data integrity, while also providing better resistance to threats such as eavesdropping and steganalysis. At the same time, it maintains low computational complexity. A key advantage of this approach is not only the strength of encryption, but also the ability to conceal the very presence of the data during transmission.
K.S et al. (Tue,) studied this question.