# A Crypto-Steganography Approach for Hiding Ransomware within HEVC Streams in Android IoT Devices
## 5 Conclusions  
This paper demonstrated that the available and modern ransomware detection systems have critical weaknesses because they do not consider the ransomware hiding pos \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Ransomware Sample**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Original**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Extracted**} \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Ransomware 5} & 06996480142715464599145a & 06996480142715464599145a \\  & 84b279066195249a7518412 & 47 dfadda3x15a & 84b279066195249a7518412 47 dfadda3x15a \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Ransomware 4} & 4c82672e77e72120e86 de4335022 & 4c82672 ee77 ac212e8 dede433 ce22 \\  & 33d650e3b2133 cc30569822 aae30 eb0 ed & 33d650 ee3b213 cc30569822 ade50 bc0 ed \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Ransomware 3} & 3b373 be488b2065055e13824b4 & 3b373 be488b2065055e13824b4 \\  & 542b5e19405e58a67946811919e7 & 5d2 ab56e19405e8867a96 8118d1199e7e7e \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Ransomware 2} & 01b7 dfad121672160821480e74e215 & 01b7 dfad11276216215480e74e215 \\  & 22c287088885767215117656b3 eb19 & 22c287084885767251157656b3 eb19 \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Ransomware 1} & 72878419943a295445a7 eda532d & 728787419943a295445a7 eda532d \\  & 4184268781346 ee22a716e864d5288 & 4184268781346 cea22a716 & bec6644d5288 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 8: Hash-256 values of ransomware samples before and after implementing the extraction algorithm. sibility. Additionally, they do not check how to detect, extract, and analyze the concealed ransomware apps inside multimedia data. In this work, an efficient hybrid crypto-steganography approach has been introduced for ransomware hiding based on AES encryption and LSB-based HEVC steganography. Consequently, this paper has exploited the video steganography process and tested its performance to hide encrypted ransomware apps inside high-resolution video streams. Comprehensive objective and subjective assessment metrics were utilized extensively to examine the proposed hybrid approach compared to related research works. In addition, various HEVC streams with different resolutions were tested to explore the hiding performance of various ransomware apps with diverse sizes. The experimental analysis disclosed that the proposed hybrid approach succeeded in hiding ransomware and bypassing all security and quality tests. Thus, it was concluded and noticed from the obtained results that the key advantages of the proposed crypto-steganography approach are (1) building a multi-level security framework for ransomware hiding using both encryption and steganography processes, (2) ensuring the ransomware privacy to avoid detection possibility even when screened by standard antivirus engines, (3) achieving strong embedding performance by preserving the quality and the main characteristics of the cover video stream after ransomware concealing, (4) performing the embedding process in a randomness manner to mitigate attack possibility, (5) choosing the best pixel location to embed the ransomware apps to maintain video imperceptibility, (6) extracting the complete hidden ransomware samples successfully, (7) verifying the integrity of the transmitted ransomware by calculating and comparing the hash values of the ransomware; before the embedding and after the extraction, and (8) achieving superior performance in terms of all investigated subjective and objective tests. The proposed crypto-steganography approach can be used in different offensive and defensive cybersecurity applications, such as (a) achieving high confidentiality of the secret data, whether benign or malicious, (b) malware/ransomware distribution through online communications, (c) Android mobile systems, (d) security of multimedia communication systems, (e) malware detection applications, and (f) the confidentiality of Android IoT data. As future work, various lightweight encryption algorithms compatible with IoT devices' resources can be investigated to encrypt the ransomware samples before embedding them in the multimedia content.