Secure and Efficient Hierarchical Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices that use sensor nodes to monitor physical or environmental conditions. These distributed autonomous devices, or nodes, combine with routers and a gateway to create a typical WSN system. The distributed sensor nodes communicate wirelessly to a central gateway, which provides a connection to the wired world where you can collect, process, analyze, and present your measurement data. Due to the broadcast nature of the transmission media they use, sensor networks are vulnerable to various security attacks, such as eavesdropping, jamming and node capture attacks. In this paper, we provide a solution for node capture attack. Node capture attacks result from the combination of active, passive and physical attacks by an intelligent adversary. In order to initialize or set up a node capture attack, the adversary will collect information about the WSN by eavesdropping on message exchanges, either local to a single adversarial device or throughout the network with the aid of a number of adversarial devices deployed throughout the network. Hence in order to securely aggregate data in a wireless sensor network, we must not only provide protection against eavesdroppers, but we should also prevent intermediate sensors from having access to the data.