Real-time watermarking techniques for sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as the major criteria that enable the next scientific, technological, engineering, and economic revolution. Since digital rights management is of the crucial importance for sensor networks, there is an urgent need for development of intellectual property protection (IPP) techniques. We have developed the first system of watermarking techniques to embed cryptologically encoded authorship signatures into data and information acquired by wireless embedded sensor networks. The key idea is to impose additional constraints during the data acquisition or sensor data processing. Constraints correspond to the encrypted signature and are selected in such a way that they provide favorable tradeoffs between the accuracy and the strength of proof of the authorship. The techniques for watermarking raw sensor data include one that modifies the location and orientation of a sensor, time management discipline (e.g. frequency and phase of intervals between consecutive data capturing), and its resolution. The second set of techniques embeds signature during data processing. There are at least three degrees of freedom that can be exploited: error minimization procedures, physical world model building, and solving of computationally intractable problems. We have developed several watermarking techniques that leverage on the error minimization degree of freedom and have demonstrated their effectiveness for watermarking location discovery information.