Efficient Secure Data Aggregation Protocol In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network is an important part of perception layer in Internet of Things. It can sense, transmit and process the environmental data through deploying a large number of distributed sensor nodes in monitoring areas. Sensor nodes can be deployed in some hostile areas where human hardly reach. So it is difficult to supply the energy of sensor nodes. How to reduce energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of network is the key problem in wireless sensor networks. Data aggregation is a usual method to deal with such issue. Through aggregating data in wireless sensor networks, the redundant data is removed and the transmission is reduced. As a result the lifetime of wireless sensor network is extended.In some special applications, such as battle battlefield surveillance, confidential data will be disclosed to the adversaries if data security is not guaranteed. Using cryptography methods can protect data confidentiality, integrity and availability. But this will lead to extra computation and communication consumption. It is difficult to design an efficient data aggregation protocol while preserve data security.Researchers have already proposed a series of data aggregation protocols in wireless sensor networks. Most protocols can only protect data confidentiality or data integrity. Some papers claim that their protocols can protect both data confidentiality and data integrity but some problems still exist. This paper proposes an efficient secure data aggregation protocol ECIPAP based on present research works. We use a lightweight homomorphic encryption algorithm to protect data confidentiality. This encryption algorithm can avoid network delay and high energy consumption caused by complicated computation. We also use result-checking mechanism to guarantee every sensing data is added to the final aggregation results, thus to protected data integrity.On this basis, we make the security analysis, theoretical performance analysis and experiment analysis based on SimpleWSN physical sensor nodes. We show that ECIPAP can reduce the energy consumption while preserve data confidentiality and data integrity through security analysis and theoretical performance analysis. After that, we implement this protocol by programing on physical sensor nodes. We analyze the situations of the sensor nodes deployed in the monitoring area and the temperature data sensed by them. The results show that ECIPAP has ideal security, efficiency and availability.Finally, we show the open questions, challenges and future directions in this research field.