In this work, a new efficient cryptographic scheme based on the concept of chaotic map and optimized watermarking scheme is proposed. In the optimized watermarking scheme, a combination of discrete wave transformation (DWT), hessenberg decomposition (HD), and singular value decomposition (SVD) are used. In this, the host image is first broken down into several sub-bands using multi-level DWT, and the resulting coefficients are then fed into HD during the embedding phase. Simultaneous watermark operation is performed on SVD. Finally, the scale factor embeds the watermark into the host image. The Differential evolution method is used to find the best scaling factor for the optimized watermarking scheme. The resulting watermarked image is then encrypted by the session key based scheme. In this scheme for each image encryption, a new random session key will be produced. The presented approach uses 64-bit plaintext and a variable size key that will be decided at the time of encryption for encrypting an image. Since session keys change with each transmission, this approach does not involve extracting and remembering session keys in order to produce subsequent session keys. IoT devices are used to test the developed method for security. The experiment’s findings shows that the suggested method works better than the current scheme in several aspects.