Watermarking technique for copyright protection of wireless sensor network data using LFSR and Kolmogorov complexity

Abstract

The function of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to collect and store data sent to other nodes or servers. Current technologies allow validation during transit, but stop after the data reaches its destination. One of the challenges with these technologies is to ensure that the source of the data is preserved, once it leaves the WSN. This is important as the data can be used by other applications or distributed to other parties. Therefore, it needs to be ensured that the data source is identifiable and the data is valid. Sensors are susceptible to various types of attack, such as data modification, data insertion and deletion, or even physical capture and sensor replacement. Hence, security becomes an important issue with WSNs. The traditional algorithms are used for securing data transmission between sensor nodes. However these algorithms need millions of multiplication instructions to perform operations, and cannot efficiently protect the copyright of the valuable sensor data. Watermarking is one of the effective choices to overcome this challenge. Watermark adds a second line of defense to ensure that the data is valid, even if someone cracks the encryption. This paper proposes a watermarking technique for copyright protection of data in WSNs. It also provides performance evaluation of the technique to show its robustness against various types of attacks, like data deletion, packet replication and Sybil attacks.