An Efficient and Verifiable Concealed Data Aggregation Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is one of the most important techniques in wireless sensor networks to save energy through reducing lots of transmission. However, plaintext aggregation is insecure since eavesdropping or modifying messages is possible. Due to this, concealed data aggregation schemes based on homomorphic encryption have been proposed. Ciphertexts can be operated algebraic computations without decryption in those schemes. Unfortunately, they only provide data confidentiality. While compromising secret in captured sensor nodes, an adversary can still create forged ciphertexts. In this paper, we combines Boneh et al.'s aggregate signature scheme and Mykletun et al.'s concealed data aggregation scheme to overcome the above problems. The proposed scheme aggregates not only ciphertexts but also signatures. Through verifying aggregated signature, data integrity of each plaintext can be guaranteed. Furthermore, the communication overhead for each cluster head is still constant. Each cluster head sends an aggregated signature and an aggregated ciphertext to the base station. For resource constrained environment, the proposed scheme is secure and efficient practically.