Investigating Approaches of Data Integrity Preservation for Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) typically use in-network processing to reduce the communication overhead. Due to the fusion of data items sourced at different nodes into a single one during in-network processing, the sanctity of the aggregated data needs to be ensured. Especially, the data integrity of the aggregated result is critical as any malicious update to it can jeopardize not one, but many sensor readings. In this paper, we analyse three different approaches to providing integrity support for SDA in WSNs. The first one is traditional MAC, in which each leaf node and intermediate node share a key with parent (symmetric key). The second is aggregate MAC (AMAC), in which a base station shares a unique key with all the other sensor nodes. The third is homomorphic MAC (Homo MAC) that is purely symmetric key-based approach. These approaches exhibit diverse trade-off in resource consumption and security assumptions. Adding together to that, we also propose a probabilistic and improved variant of homomorphic MAC that improves the security strength for secure data aggregation in WSNs. We carry out simulations in TinyOS environment to experimentally evaluate the impact of each of these on the resource consumption in WSNs.