A Trust-Based Secure Data Aggregation Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Generally, the security issues in data aggregation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are: data confidentiality and data integrity. Data confidentiality, which protects the sensitive transmitted data from the passive attacks such as eavesdropping, is the basic security issue. Data integrity prevents the compromised source nodes or aggregator nodes from significantly altering the final aggregation value. This paper proposes a trust-based secure data aggregation protocol for WSN. It does not involve any centralized infrastructure. It uses Combined Trust Values (CTVs) to favor packet forwarding for each node. In the proposed scheme, each sensor node has a CTV which is based on the trust evaluation factors, such as identification, sensing data and consistency. Based on these factors, one can identify malicious or compromised nodes, and filter their data from the networks. Each aggregator determines a Message Authentication Code (MAC) value for the aggregated data and finally all the aggregated data reach the sink node. By verifying the MAC value of the aggregators, the sink identifies and eliminates the misbehaving aggregators. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves good delivery ratio and throughput.