Telecommun Syst DOI 10.1007/s11235-015-0047-0 SDAW: secure data aggregation watermarking-based scheme in homogeneous WSNs Djallel Eddine Boubiche 1 · Sabrina Boubiche 1 · Homero Toral-Cruz 2 · Al-Sakib Khan Pathan 3 · Azzedine Bilami 1 · Samir Athmani 1 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Redundant data retransmission problem in wire- less sensor networks (WSNs) can be eliminated using the data aggregation process which combines similar data to reduce the resource-consumption and consequently, saves energy during data transmission. In the recent days, many researchers have focused on securing this paradigm despite the constraints it imposes such as the limited resources. Most of the solutions proposed to secure the data aggregation process in WSNs are essentially based on the use of encryp- tion keys to protect data during their transmission in the network. Indeed, the key generation and distribution mech- anisms involve additional computation costs and consume more of energy. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a new security mechanism to secure data aggregation in WSNs called SDAW (secure data aggregation watermarking-based B Djallel Eddine Boubiche dj.boubiche@gmail.com Sabrina Boubiche s_boubiche@esi.dz Homero Toral-Cruz htoral@uqroo.edu.mx Al-Sakib Khan Pathan sakib@iium.edu.my Azzedine Bilami abilami@yahoo.fr Samir Athmani samir1904@yahoo.fr 1 LaSTIC Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Batna, Batna, Algeria 2 Department of Sciences and Engineering, University of Quintana Roo (UQROO), Chetumal, México 3 Department of Computer Science, Kulliyyah (Faculty) of Information and Communication Technology International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Gombak, Malaysia scheme in homogeneous WSNs). Our mechanism aims to secure the data aggregation process while saving energy. For this, the mechanism uses a lightweight fragile watermarking technique without encryption to insure the authentication and the integrity of the sensed data while saving the energy. The links between the sensor nodes and the aggregation nodes, and also the links between the aggregation nodes and the base station are secured by using the watermarking mechanism. Keywords Data aggregation · Digital watermarking · Security · Wireless sensor networks · Energy efficiency 1 Introduction Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are considered as one of the most important technologies widely used in this century because of their increasing involvement in many important applications such as object detection and military monitor- ing, environmental surveillance, disaster management, etc. A WSN is generally composed of many tiny sensor nodes. Their main task is to collect data from the environment and transmit those to a sink or base station which is responsible for processing the sent data. The data transmitted through the network are exposed to many security threats and prob- lems which may affect their legitimacy and the capacity of being processed correctly. One of these problems is the fact that data are frequently redundant and interrelated. Hence, several methods are suggested to solve this problem. The data aggregation mechanism allows the combination of data from the different nodes in the network, eliminat- ing thus the data redundancy and reducing consequently the number of transmitted packets in the network. Secur- ing this mechanism means protecting the collected data and the aggregation results from their unauthorized modification. 123