Secure data aggregation without persistent cryptographic operations in wireless sensor networks

Abstract In-network data aggregation is an essential operation to reduce energy consumption in large-scale wireless sensor networks. With data aggregation, however, raw data items are invisible to the base station and thus the authenticity of the aggregated data is hard to guarantee. A compromised sensor node may forge an aggregation value and mislead the base station into trusting a false reading. Due to the stringent constraints of energy supply and computing capability on sensor nodes, it is challenging to detect a compromised sensor node and keep it from cheating, since expensive cryptographic operations are unsuitable for tiny sensor devices. This paper proposes a secure aggregation tree (SAT) to detect and prevent cheating. Our method is essentially different from other existing solutions in that it does not require any cryptographic operations when all sensor nodes work honestly. The detection of cheating is based on the topological constraints in the aggregation tree. We also propose a weighted voting scheme to determine a misbehaving node and a secure local recovery scheme to avoid using the misbehaving node.