Secure In-Network Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In-network aggregation is a natural approach in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to collaboratively process data generated by the sensor nodes. Besides processing, in-network aggregation also achieves effective energy consumption and bandwidth utilization. Since the sensing devices of a WSN are prone to a variety of attacks due to wireless communication and limited resources, secure in-network aggregation is a great challenge. This article proposes a secure in-network aggregation (SINA) protocol for additive aggregation functions. This protocol integrates privacy homomorphism (PH) and secret sharing to achieve both data confidentiality and data integrity. Additionally, the proposed protocol ensures message authentication and data freshness. Moreover, it achieves false data screening in-network should be changed as in-network false data screening which considerably saves energy by not transmitting false packets. Security analysis reveals that SINA protects the network from variety of attacks. Performance analysis shows that SINA consumes less energy while achieving end-to-end security, and thereby increases the lifetime of the WSN.