LVPDA: A Lightweight and Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme for Edge-Enabled IoT

Abstract

Edge computing is envisioned to be a powerful platform that provides efficient data storage and computation services in the smart Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. In this data-intensive architecture, protecting user-side data privacy is one of the most critical concerns to prevent privacy leakage from any other untrusted entities. Aiming to resist this concern, many privacy-preserving data aggregation (PPDA) schemes have been proposed for various cloud-enabled IoT applications. However, due to the resource-constrained nature of the smart IoT devices, the conventional PPDA solutions, in terms of both privacy and performance requirements, are unsuitable in edge computing. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight and verifiable PPDA scheme, named LVPDA, for the edge-computing-enabled IoT system, where the Paillier homomorphic encryption method and an online/offline signature technique are combined to ensure the privacy preserving and integrity verification during the data aggregation process. A detailed security analysis indicates that LVPDA is existentially unforgeable under the chosen message attack (EU-CMA) and the data integrity can be guaranteed with formal proof under $q$ -strong Diffie–Hellman ( $q$ -SDH) assumptions. Compared with other PPDA methods, our scheme can achieve lightweight PPDA in terms of less computational complexity and communication overhead.