An efficient and secure recoverable data aggregation scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract In wireless sensor networks, data aggregation plays an important role in reducing energy consumption. Recently, research has focused on secure data aggregation due to the open and hostile environment deployed. The Homomorphic Encryption (HE) scheme is extensively used to protect data confidentiality. However, HE-based data aggregation schemes have the following drawbacks: malleability, unauthorized aggregation, and limited aggregation functions. To solve these problems, we propose a secure data aggregation scheme by combining homomorphic encryption technology with a signature scheme. The proposed scheme makes three contributions. First, it achieves in-network false data filtering to avoid the consumption of unnecessary transmission energy. Second, it ensures authorized aggregation and the base station can identify the origin and validity of the messages received. Finally, the base station can recover the original sensing data, and thus can perform arbitrary aggregation operations. Comprehensive analyses and comparisons were conducted to prove the feasibility and efficiency of our scheme. The results show that our scheme performs effectively in terms of communication overhead, computational overhead, energy consumption, and delay. Additionally, even though the size of the aggregated results is large, our scheme enables the base station to quickly decrypt ciphertexts and obtain the original data unlike its counterparts.