Hybrid Secure Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Secure data aggregation aims at combining security and data aggregation together to meet the requirements of data-centric networks such as wireless sensor network. Secure data aggregation protocols provide either hop-by-hop security or end-to-end security. However, hop-by-hop secure data aggregation is vulnerable to attackers at intermediate nodes while end-to-end secure data aggregation increases the communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a hybrid secure data aggregation protocol to balance the trade-off between privacy and communication overhead. The proposed protocol uses the symmetric-key based privacy homomorphism to ensure the privacy of sensor readings at intermediate nodes. In addition, the proposed protocol efficiently deals with the key management issues that exist in the state-of-the-art symmetric-key based protocols. The proposed protocol also reduces the communication overhead as compared to the existing end-to-end secure data aggregation protocols. Comprehensive analysis and comparisons validate the viability of the proposed protocol in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks.