A Novel Approach for Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of resource starved sensor nodes that are deployed to sense, process and communicate vital information to the base station. Due to the stringent constraints on the resources in the sensor nodes on one hand and due to the communications costs being always significantly higher than the data processing costs, the WSNs typically, employ in-network processing, which aims at reducing effectively, the total number of packets eventually transmitted to the base station. Such innetwork processing largely employs data aggregation operations that aggregate the data into a compact representation for further transmission. However, due to the ubiquitous & pervasive deployment, heavier resource demands of the security protocols and due to the stringent resource constraints in WSN nodes, the security concerns in WSNs are even otherwise critical. These concerns assume alarming proportions when using data aggregation in which the output of the data aggregator nodes depends on that of various other nodes. Hence, the protocols for data aggregation have to carefully devised with a constant vigil on ensuring security of the data. In this paper, based on our survey of the existing research efforts for ensuring secure data aggregation, we propose a novel approach using homomorphic encryption and additive digital signatures to achieve confidentiality, integrity and availability for secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks.