A sensitive data aggregation scheme for body sensor networks based on data hiding

Body sensor networks (BSNs) enable the pervasive, long-term, and real-time monitoring in any environment and without restriction of activity. Security and privacy are extremely critical issues of BSNs, as sensitive information is transmitted through the wireless network. This paper proposes a novel sensitive data aggregation scheme based on data hiding for BSNs, namely SDAS. SDAS adopts the packet combination based on the sensitive data aggregation tree built in each BSN to reduce the transmission energy consumption by eliminating transmitted redundancy. After lossless compression, the compressed sensitive data are embedded into various ordinary data in the combined packet by using a lightweight data hiding algorithm to prevent the disclosure of the sensitive data and avoid arousing the attention of attackers. Extensive analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme can ensure a high level of security and privacy of the sensitive data without affecting the ordinary data quality, while delivering low power consumption.