Efficiently secure image transmission against tampering in wireless visual sensor networks

Wireless visual sensor networks for surveillance can dissipate their limited resources to process irrelevant images maliciously injected by compromised nodes. In particular, since nodes compromised by tampering reveal their security keys to encrypt messages, traditional data authentication techniques cannot identify false data deceivably encrypted by such stolen keys. To challenge this problem, this paper first presents a surveillance-fitted network model where our false data sensitive protocol efficiently works. The protocol allows malicious messages to travel only one hop by authentically and semantically testing every packet and every image sent from wireless cameras vulnerable to tampering. We additionally suggest a dynamic key scheme which lets wireless sensors employ a different key in each communication for reasonable resource consumption, in order to reduce a possibility of key disclosure itself. Two lemmas and three comparison results verify how well our three approaches outperform their alternatives in resiliency to compromised nodes and memory, computation and communication overheads.