An efficient secure data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often consists of a large number of low-cost sensor nodes that have strictly limited sensing, computation, and communication capabilities. Due to these unique specifications and a lack of tamper-resistant hardware, devising security protocols for WSNs is complex. Previous studies show that data transmission consumes much more energy than computation. Data aggregation can greatly help to reduce this consumption by eliminating redundant data. As wireless sensor networks are usually deployed in remote and hostile environments and used to transmit sensitive information, sensor nodes are prone to node compromise attacks and hence security issues such as data confidentiality and integrity are extremely important. A novel approach, which uses homomorphic encryption and additive digital signatures, is proposed to provide confidentiality, integrity for secure data aggregation in WSNs. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is efficient and scalable for large WSNs.