Watermark Based Sensor Data Protection System for Wireless Sensor Network

Most of the sensor nodes in the Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation systems (HAS) applications are designed to be low-cost and energy efficient. These devices are expected to be lightweight, and flexible with low maintenance. These criteria limit the computational and communications capabilities of such systems whereas system protection and data authentication have always been limitation factors due to security cost complexity.In this paper, we investigate and propose a simple, lightweight, and cost-effective watermark security method for Wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is an improved version of our previous research on the metadata-enhanced cross-watermarking approach. The original watermark generator has been extended to achieve cipher block chaining integrating with side-channel watermarking. The watermark bits are hidden in the transmitting channel properties. The experimental results and security analysis prove this scheme, provide data authenticity and transmission integrity without additional security payload.