The Internet of Things (IoT) is integrating the Internet and smart devices in almost every domain such as home automation, e-healthcare systems, vehicular networks, industrial control and military applications. In these sectors, sensory data, which is collected from multiple sources and managed through intermediate processing by multiple nodes, is used for decision-making processes. Ensuring data integrity and keeping track of data provenance is a core requirement in such a highly dynamic context, since data provenance is an important tool for the assurance of data trustworthiness. Dealing with such requirements is challenging due to the limited computational and energy resources in IoT networks. This requires addressing several challenges such as processing overhead, secure provenance, bandwidth consumption and storage efficiency. In this paper, we propose ZIRCON, a novel zero-watermarking approach to establish end-to-end data trustworthiness in an IoT network. In ZIRCON, provenance information is stored in a tamper-proof centralized network database through watermarks, generated at source node before transmission. We provide an extensive security analysis showing the resilience of our scheme against passive and active attacks. We also compare our scheme with existing works based on performance metrics such as computational time, energy utilization and cost analysis. The results show that ZIRCON is robust against several attacks, lightweight, storage efficient, and better in energy utilization and bandwidth consumption, compared to prior art.

翻译：物联网（IoT）正将互联网与智能设备集成到家庭自动化、电子医疗系统、车载网络、工业控制及军事应用等几乎所有领域。在这些场景中，从多源采集并经多节点中间处理的管理传感数据，被用于决策制定流程。在如此高度动态的环境中，确保数据完整性并追踪数据溯源是核心需求，因为数据溯源是保障数据可信性的重要工具。由于物联网网络的计算资源和能量资源有限，满足这些需求面临诸多挑战，需解决处理开销、安全溯源、带宽消耗及存储效率等问题。本文提出ZIRCON——一种新颖的零水印方法，用于在物联网网络中建立端到端的数据可信性。在ZIRCON中，溯源信息通过传输前在源节点生成的水印，存储于防篡改的集中式网络数据库中。我们通过广泛的安全性分析证明该方案对被动与主动攻击具有鲁棒性。同时基于计算时间、能量消耗及成本分析等性能指标，将本方案与现有工作进行对比。结果表明，相较先前技术，ZIRCON在抵御多种攻击方面表现稳健，且具有轻量级、存储高效、能量利用与带宽消耗更优的特点。