A Dual-Chaining Watermark Scheme for Data Integrity Protection in Internet of Things

Chaining watermark is an effective way to verify the integrity of streaming data in wireless network environment, especially in resource-constrained sensor networks, such as the perception layer of Internet of Things applications. However, in all existing single chaining watermark schemes, how to ensure the synchronization between the data sender and the receiver is still an unsolved problem. Once the synchronization points are attacked by the adversary, existing data integrity authentication schemes are difficult to work properly, and the false negative rate might be up to 50 percent. And the additional fixed group delimiters not only increase the data size, but are also easily detected by adversaries. In this paper, we propose an effective dual-chaining watermark scheme, called DCW, for data integrity protection in smart campus IoT applications. The proposed DCW scheme has the following three characteristics: (1) In order to authenticate the integrity of the data, fragile watermarks are generated and embedded into the data in a chaining way using dynamic grouping; (2) Instead of additional fixed group delimiters, chained watermark delimiters are proposed to synchronize the both transmission sides in case of the synchronization points are tampered; (3) To achieve lossless integrity authentication, a reversible watermarking technique is applied. The experimental results and security analysis can prove that the proposed DCW scheme is able to effectively authenticate the integrity of the data with free distortion at low cost in our smart meteorological Internet of Things system.