With the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), data security has gained considerable attention. Since the sensor node is in a special environment with small volume and limited storage space, it is highly likely to be attacked illegally when transmitting the data. This paper proposes a watermarking scheme based on individual certification for sensor nodes. The data is grouped in a sensor node. A watermarking bit is generated by associating several other data items within a group, and is embedded in the group as a space. At the sink node, the extracted watermarking bit is compared with the watermarking bit generated by the same way in the sensor node to determine whether the data item has been tampered. The watermarking bit embedded in the proposed scheme is extremely difficult to be found in the transmission process. Meanwhile, it does not change the original data. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed scheme has superior performance compared with other certification schemes in WSNs.INDEX TERMS Watermark, individual certification, embedded spaces, data group.