CQDW: A Cyclic-Queue-based Dynamic Watermarking Mechanism for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are data-centric and self-organized, so data security is a major concern in WSNs which relies heavily on key-based cryptography. However, data integrity and authenticity cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a lightweight watermarking security mechanism, cyclic-queue-based dynamic watermarking mechanism(CQDW) to ensure data transmission integrity in WSNs. The proposed watermarking mechanism analyzes the original collective data and dynamically generates watermarks based on the cyclic queues. Then the order and location of watermark embedding are determined by the wake-up time of the sensor nodes and the secret data queue. Therefore, the watermarking mechanism provides greater security performance at a lower resource cost to protect data integrity and authenticity. Compared with the previous watermarking mechanisms, the simulation results show that it has obvious superiority in detection accuracy and operation efficiency.