A novel watermarking scheme for authenticating individual data integrity of WSNs

Abstract

The limited computing power of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and data tampering during wireless transmission are two important issues. In this paper, we propose a scheme for independent individual authentication of WSNs data based on digital watermarking technology. Digital watermarking suits well for WSNs, owing to its lower computational cost. The proposed scheme uses independent individual to generate a digital watermark and embeds the watermark in current data item. Moreover, a sink node extracts the watermark in single data and compares it with the generated watermark, thereby achieving integrity verification of data. Inherently, individual validation differs from the grouping-level validation, and avoids the lack of grouping robustness. The improved performance of individual integrity verification based on proposed scheme is validated through experimental analysis. Lastly, compared to other state-of-the-art schemes, our proposed scheme significantly reduces the false negative rate by an average of 5%, the false positive rate by an average of 80% of data verification, and increases the correct verification rate by 50% on average.