A Resilient Edge Data Integrity Verification Approach Via Robust Merkle Trees and Steganographic Transmission

Edge Data Integrity Verification (EDIV) plays a crucial role in maintaining the authenticity of cached data replicas in decentralized and resource-constrained edge computing environments. However, existing EDIV methods prioritize generating cryptographic proofs while overlooking the need to ensure robustness against localized data tampering and neglecting the inherent security risks involved in transmitting these proofs over untrusted backhaul communication networks. These gaps leave the EDIV process vulnerable to both the manipulation of integrity proofs and their interception during transmission, ultimately undermining the reliability of EDIV. To address these gaps, we propose RAMTStego-EDIV, a novel framework that ensures both the robustness of integrity proofs and their secure transmission. In particular, RAMTStego-EDIV first introduces the Robust Aggregated Merkle Tree (RAMT)—a ternary hash tree that combines real and auxiliary nodes to produce tamper-evident cryptographic proofs, ensuring that even partial manipulation of the data can be reliably detected. Then, it develops a dual-parity transmission control protocol (TCP) steganography technique to protect the transmission of the RAMT-driven cryptographic proofs that covertly embed the proof bits into two TCP header fields: the parity of the payload length and the least significant bit of the TCP window size. This embedding allows proofs to travel invisibly within normal traffic, avoiding detection and interference by adversaries monitoring the network. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that RAMTStego-EDIV prevents proof tampering and interception, confirming its resilience and suitability for deployment in adversarial mobile edge computing environments.