Towards a formally verified zero watermarking scheme for data integrity in the Internet of Things based-wireless sensor networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm in which billions of devices communicate, thus producing and exchanging information related to real world objects (things). Sensor nodes are specialized nodes for handling transmission of a large volume of data in situations where the source nodes communicate with base stations (BS) via a set of intermediate nodes. Applications based on WSN claim that integrity and trustworthiness are the key aspects as the data received from source nodes is the major source for BS to take critical decisions. To establish the trustworthiness between sensor node and BS, a novel zero watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. In order to ensure integrity and trustworthiness, our proposed scheme embeds a watermark in original data before it is transmitted to BS which is responsible for verifying the watermark embedded with data. We have compared proposed scheme with existing Asymmetric Cryptography (ACT) and Reversible Watermarking (RW) schemes based on the performance parameters such as computational overhead and the energy utilization. Analysis results suggest that proposed scheme can handle multiple attacks on data and watermark such as data deletion, data modification, and data insertion attack. Moreover, our experimental results demonstrate that the presented scheme is lightweight, computationally efficient, and better in energy utilization. A formal verification for proof of correctness using high level Petri nets (HLPNs) is also provided to verify the claims of our work.