Identity-based secure data aggregation in big data wireless sensor networks

Secure data aggregation (SDA) is an inherent paradigm in big data wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce data transmissions, maximise the network lifetime and provide security. However, SDA protocols that use elliptic curve suffer from mapping and reverse mapping functions. Currently, there is no known mapping function which is both homomorphic and effective in reverse mapping. In addition, SDA protocols that use public key infrastructure incurs high computation and communication cost. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel identity-based secure data aggregation (ISDA) protocol for big data wireless sensor networks. This protocol is based on bilinear pairing and combines identity-based homomorphic encryption scheme with identity-based signature to achieve end-to-end security. In WSNs, this is the first SDA protocol that employs both identity-based encryption and identity-based signature scheme. ISDA shares the same public/private keys during encryption and signature generation, which significantly reduces the complexity of the protocol. Security analysis reveals that ISDA is secure against various internal and external attacks and proves the correctness of the proposed protocol. Performance evaluation shows that ISDA incurs less overhead than state-of-the-art bilinear pairing-based SDA schemes, thereby it minimises the energy consumption and increases the lifetime of wireless sensor networks.