Metadata Enhanced Security Watermarks for Sensor Data Protection

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Home Automation Systems are rapidly evolving areas of technology. Since these systems are commonly used with lightweight sensor nodes which have limited computational and communications capabilities, low-cost measures for integrity protection and authenticity verification are required to protect sensor data. Dynamic water-marking of sensor data is an approach to detect various kinds of sensor attacks such as hardware manipulation, network replay attacks or sensor data modification attacks both at the sensor source node and also on the connecting network. We propose a metadata enhanced digital watermark, which bits are embedded in the (least significant bits) LSB's of the transmitted sensor data to reach zero payload size increase.