Two Security Layers for Hierarchical Data Aggregation in Sensor Networks

Abstract: Due to resource restricted sensor nodes, it is important to minimize the amount of data transmission among sensor networks. To reduce the amount of sending data, an aggregation approach can be applied along the path from sensors to the sink. However, as sensor networks are often deployed in untrusted and even hostile environments, sensor nodes are prone to node compromise attacks. Hence, an end-to-end secure aggregation approach is required to ensure a healthy data reception. In this paper, we propose two layers for secure data aggregation in sensor networks. Firstly, we provide an end-to-end encryption scheme that supports operations over cypher-text. It is based on elliptic curve cryptography that exploits a smaller key size, allows the use of higher number of operations on cypher-texts, and prevents the distinction between two identical texts from their cryptograms. Secondly, we propose a new watermarking-based authentication that enables sensor nodes to ensure the identity of other nodes they are communicating with. Our experiments show that our hybrid approach of secure data aggregation enhances the security, significantly reduces computation and communication overhead, and can be practically implemented in on-the-shelf sensor platforms.