Efficient and Secure Data Transmission and Sinkhole Detection in a Multi-Clustering Wireless Sensor Network Based on Homomorphic Encryption and Watermarking

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network, the sensors periodically transmit sensed data from a specific environment to a centralized station by wireless communication. Deployment in an open environment leads to the potential of security attacks. A sinkhole attack is a destructive attack aimed at the network layer, where the sinkhole node attracts other nodes by advertising itself as the best path to the base station. Subsequently receiving other sensor node packets and compromising network security. Hence, this work proposes a lightweight, secure method based on the Threshold Sensitive Energy Efficient Sensor Network protocol and watermarking techniques to ensure data integrity during transmission. The homomorphic encryption used in this scheme is to provide fast and efficient and consumes less energy while identifying sensor nodes for the purpose of sinkhole detection and prevention. The proposed work has been evaluated using OMNET++ simulation environment to measure the proposed work performance in the following metrics: delay, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and average energy consumption. Compared with previous works, the proposed work shows better results in these metrics. In addition, the proposed scheme consumes less energy compared with similar works due to the use of lightweight watermarking and authentication techniques. The results show that the proposed scheme enhances security by detecting the sinkhole attacker node before the attack is even activated. In addition, the proposed method ensures the integrity and authenticity of the sensed data while transmitting them from the sensor node until receiving it in the base station, and it can detect any tampering of the data.

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“…Cryptography is another mechanism for avoiding or at least minimizing the external attacks that target the Wireless Sensor Network. It can guarantee that different security services such as authentication and integrity by examining the source and contents of data packet using numerous methods such as symmetric encryption, public-key cryptography, and hash functions [13] [14]. This research illustrates how cryptography employed in securing the WSN from external kinds of attacks.…”

Secure Watermarking Schemes and Their Approaches in the IoT Technology: An Overview

“…Regarding the data integrity, the hash function is used in the watermarking method in [101][102][103]. The authors in [101] propose the double-authentication strategy in the watermarking technology in order to secure the transfer of data from the source-drone along to the edge-router.…”

“…This proposal demonstrates the resistance to tampering and data replay. In [102], the researchers propose a lightweight watermark algorithm by using a homomorphic encryption and hash function along with the WSN data in order to embed the watermarking data. In [103], the watermark embedding locations and mechanisms are determined based on different channel conditions for ensuring the watermark security and energy efficiency.…”

A GOA Based Secure Routing Algorithm for Improving Packet Delivery and Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The WSN has some security goals such as primary and secondary. The primary goal includes confidentiality, integrity, and authentication and the secondary goal includes data freshness, self-organization, secure localization, and self-organization [14,15]. The encryption has done using three keys: such as hash, private and public keys.…”