Novel Secure Data Transmission Methods for IoT Based on STP-CS With Multilevel Critical Information Concealment Function

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a large-scale network of various sensing devices connected via the Internet to achieve intelligent functions. Efficient secure data transmission is a significant guarantee for specific functions of IoT. In recent years, compressive sensing (CS) has been applied to the field of the IoT and a substantial number of CS-based IoT data transmission schemes have been proposed. While existing IoT data transmission schemes based on CS could mostly accomplish signal sampling, data compression, and encrypted transmission, the goal of privacy protection has rarely been achieved. Based on chaos theory and semi-tensor product CS (STP-CS), this article proposes two novel secure data transmission methods for different scenarios of IoT: 1) multiple concealing method (MC method) and 2) precise concealing method (PC method). Both methods can provide different levels of reconstruction results for different receivers with various authorization levels. The feasibility, storage requirements, robustness, and security of the proposed methods are theoretically analyzed and experimentally simulated. The results show that the proposed methods ensure both the stability and security of data transmission, save storage space of sensors, and flexibly protect the privacy of the content of data transmitted.