Optimized secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

With continuing developments in miniaturization and battery design, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are poised to become common technology in our daily lives. Low cost and flexibility of deployment make WSNs well suited for a wide variety of military, environmental, healthcare, and commercial applications. Some WSN applications, such as monitoring patients in hospitals or weapons targeting in battlefront require endto- end data confidentiality. However, since WSNs are made up of many resource limited sensor nodes, they are typically unable to sustain the high volumes of data transmissions. Using innetwork data aggregation, sensor data from multiple nodes can be combined before being forwarded to neighboring nodes; and thus, energy consumption can be reduced significantly. But in situations where sensor nodes privacy is non-negotiable, data aggregation cannot be implemented at the cost of security. Therefore, there is a strong need for secure data aggregation (SDA) protocols designed to fit the unique properties and considerable constraints of WSNs. Existing end-to-end solutions are either insecure or impractical. In this paper, we propose a novel solution for the secure aggregation of data in WSNs based on probabilistic homomorphic encryption. By combining with a unique encoding function, our solution guarantees the privacy of sensor data, while also greatly reducing communication costs.