On the usefulness of information hiding techniques for wireless sensor networks security

Abstract: A wireless sensor network (WSN) typically consists of base stations and a large number of wireless sensors. The sensory data gathered from the whole network at a certain time snapshot can be visualized as an image. As a result, information hiding techniques can be applied to this "sensory data image". Steganography refers to the technology of hiding data into digital media without drawing any suspicion, while steganalysis is the art of detecting the presence of steganography. This article provides a brief review of steganography and steganalysis applications for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Then we show that the steganographic techniques are both related to sensed data authentication in wireless sensor networks, and when considering the attacker point of view, which has not yet been investigated in the literature. Our simulation results show that the sink level is unable to detect an attack carried out by the nsF5 algorithm on sensed data.