A novel secure aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks using stateful public key cryptography

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are nowadays considered as an important part of the Internet of Things (IoT). In these networks, data aggregation plays an essential role in energy preservation. However, WSNs are usually deployed in hostile and unattended environments (e.g. military applications) in which the confidentiality and integrity security services are widely desired. Recently, homomorphic encryptions have been applied to conceal sensitive information during aggregation such that algebraic operations are done directly on ciphertexts without decryption. The main benefit is that they offer the end-to-end data confidentiality and they do not require expensive computation at aggregator nodes since no encryption and decryption are performed. However, existing solutions either incur a considerable overhead or have limited applicability to certain types of aggregate queries. This paper presents a novel secure data aggregation protocol for WSNs. The scheme employs Stateful Public Key Encryption (StPKE) and some previous techniques in order to provide an efficient end-to-end security. Moreover, our solution does not impose any bound on the aggregation function’s nature (Maximum, Minimum, Average, etc.). We present and implement our scheme on TelosB as well as MicaZ sensor network platforms and measure the execution time of our various cryptographic functions. Simulations are also conducted to show how our scheme can achieve a high security level (by providing the above security services) with a low overhead (in terms of computation and communication) in large-scale scenario.