  Addressing the security concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a
challenging task, which has attracted the attention of many researchers from
the last few decades. Researchers have presented various schemes in WSN,
addressing the problems of processing, bandwidth, load balancing, and efficient
routing. However, little work has been done on security aspects of WSN. In a
typical WSN network, the tiny nodes installed on different locations sense the
surrounding environment, send the collected data to their neighbors, which in
turn is forwarded to a sink node. The sink node aggregate the data received
from different sensors and send it to the base station for further processing
and necessary actions. In highly critical sensor networks such as military and
law enforcement agencies networks, the transmission of such aggregated data via
the public network Internet is very sensitive and vulnerable to various attacks
and risks. Therefore, this paper provides a solution for addressing these
security issues based on steganography, where the aggregated data can be
embedded as a secret message inside an innocent-looking cover image. The stego
image containing the embedded data can be then sent to fusion center using
Internet. At the fusion center, the hidden data is extracted from the image,
the required processing is performed and decision is taken accordingly.
Experimentally, the proposed method is evaluated by objective analysis using
peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), normalized cross
correlation (NCC), and structural similarity index metric (SSIM), providing
promising results in terms of security and image quality, thus validating its
superiority.
