Lightweight Security Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks through Information Hiding and Data Flipping

Eavesdroppers can easily intercept the data transmitted in a wireless sensor network (WSN) because of the network’s open properties and constrained resources. Therefore, it is important to ensure data confidentiality in WSN with highly efficient security mechanisms. We proposed a lightweight security transmission method based on information hiding and random data flipping to ensure that the ally fusion center (AFC) can achieve confidential data transmission over insecure open links. First, the sensors’ local measurements are coded into a customized binary string, and then before data transmission, some parts of the string are flipped by the sensors according to the outputs of a pre-deployed pseudo-random function. The AFC can recover the flipped binaries using the same function and extract the measurement hidden in the string, while the enemy fusion center (EFC) cannot distinguish flipped and non-flipped data at all, and they cannot restore the measurement correctly as long as one bit in the string is not correctly recovered. We proved the security and anti-interference of the scheme through both simulations and physical experiments. Furthermore, the proposed method is more efficient such that it consumes less power than traditional digital encryptions through real power consumption tests.