A digital watermarking approach to secure and precise range query processing in sensor networks

Two-tiered wireless sensor networks offer good scalability, efficient power usage, and space saving. However, storage nodes are more attractive to attackers than sensors because they store sensor collected data and processing sink issued queries. A compromised storage node not only reveals sensor collected data, but also may reply incomplete or wrong query results. In this paper, we propose QuerySec, a protocol that enables storage nodes to process queries correctly while prevents them from revealing both data from sensors and queries from the sink. To protect privacy, we propose an order preserving function-based scheme to encode both sensor collected data and sink issued queries, which allows storage nodes to process queries correctly without knowing the actual values of both data and queries. To preserve integrity, we proposed a link watermarking scheme, where data items are formed into a link by the watermarks embedded in them so that any deletion in query results can be detected.