Aggregating secure data in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In a large sensor network, in-network data aggregation significantly reduces the amount of communication overhead and energy consumption. Due to less amount of data transmission, so that the average sensor lifetime and the overall bandwidth utilization are improved. As wireless sensor networks are usually deployed in remote and hostile environments to transmit sensitive information. Sensor nodes are prone to node compromise attacks and security issues such as data confidentiality and integrity are extremely important. Recently, A robust aggregation framework called synopsis diffusion which combines multipath routing schemes with duplicate-insensitive algorithms to accurately compute aggregates (e.g., predicate Count, Sum) in spite of message losses resulting from node and transmission failures. However, this aggregation framework does not address the problem of false sub aggregate values contributed by compromised nodes resulting in large errors in the aggregate computed at the base station, which is the root node in the aggregation hierarchy. This is an important problem since sensor networks are highly vulnerable to node compromises due to the unattended nature of sensor nodes and the lack of tamper-resistant hardware. The proposed algorithm is a light weight verification algorithm by which the base station can determine if the computed aggregate (predicate Count and Sum) includes any false contribution. Through theoretical analysis and extensive simulation study, it is shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms other existing approaches.