Enhancing Security in Wireless Internet of Things Sensor Networks: A CRC-Based Message Authentication Approach with Collision Mitigation and Digital Watermarking

This research proposes an enhanced authentication mechanism for Wireless IoT Sensor Networks (WITSN) by integrating digital watermarking with Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC). The proposed method enhances message integrity, reduces authentication failures, and mitigates security threats, including replay attacks and eavesdropping. Experimental validation using NS-3 simulations and real-world healthcare IoT datasets demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves a 98.2% authentication success rate, significantly outperforming traditional CRC-based authentication (78.2%) and SHA-256 (85.1%). Additionally, the method reduces collision probability from 22.5% (CRC-only) to 5.6%, ensuring more reliable authentication in congested networks. Compared to ECC-based authentication, which incurs a 42% higher processing delay, the proposed method achieves low computational overhead with only a 7% increase over CRC, while also improving security. These results confirm that CRC + Digital Watermarking strikes a balance between security, efficiency, and computational feasibility, making it an optimal authentication solution for resource-constrained IoT environments. Future work will focus on real-world hardware implementation to further validate performance in large-scale IoT deployments.