Novel order preserving encryption scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

An Order-Preserving Encryption (OPE) scheme is a deterministic cipher scheme, whose encryption algorithm produces cipher texts that preserve the numerical ordering of the plain-texts. It is based on strictly increasing functions. It is a kind of homomorphic encryption where the homomorphic operation is order comparison. This means that comparing encrypted data provides the exact result than comparing the original data. It is attractive to be used in databases, especially in cloud ones as a method to enhance security, since it allows applications to perform order queries over encrypted data efficiently (without the need of decrypting the data). Wireless sensor network is another potential domain in which order preserving encryption can be adopted and used with high impact. It can be integrated with secure data aggregation protocols that use comparison operations to aggregate data (MAX, MIN, etc.) in a way that no decryption is being performed on the sensor nodes, which means directly less power consumption. In this paper, we will review many existing order-preserving encryption schemes with their related brief explanation, efficiency level, and security. Then, and based on the comparative table generated, we will propose a novel order-preserving encryption scheme that has a good efficiency level and less complexity, in order to be used in a wireless sensor network with an enhanced level of security.