A secure data transmission scheme for wireless sensor networks based on digital watermarking

Wireless sensor networks are self-organized and data-centric. Sensor nodes are typically deployed in unattended environment, and therefore the security is a critical issue that must be resolved in many applications. In order to prevent the sensitive data from eavesdropping and tampering, this paper proposes a secure data transmission scheme based on digital watermarking technique. The sensor node calculates the hash value of two time-adjacent sensitive data using one-way hash function, and then takes the sensitive data as watermark information to embed into a part of the hash sequence. The destination node extracts the watermark information from the hash sequence according to the watermark extraction algorithm, and meanwhile we could get the remaining part of the hash sequence that not changed during the extraction. Then, compared the remaining part of the hash sequence with the hash value which is recalculated based on the sensitive data to verify whether the data have been tampered during the transmission. Compare to other digital watermarking method, our algorithm is simple and does not increase the volume of data. Analysis shows that our scheme can effectively prevent the sensor data being intercepted, and detect precisely whether the data have been tampered with.