Secure and Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews privacy-preserving data aggregation protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks, analyzes the vulnerabilities of the CPDA protocol, and proposes enhancements to improve its security and energy efficiency.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of existing protocols, identifies security flaws in CPDA, and introduces modifications to make it more secure and energy-efficient.

Findings

Identified security vulnerabilities in the CPDA protocol.

Proposed modifications enhance security and energy efficiency.

Surveyed current privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes.

Abstract

Data aggregation in intermediate nodes (called aggregator nodes) is an effective approach for optimizing consumption of scarce resources like bandwidth and energy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, in-network processing poses a problem for the privacy of the sensor data since individual data of sensor nodes need to be known to the aggregator node before the aggregation process can be carried out. In applications of WSNs, privacy-preserving data aggregation has become an important requirement due to sensitive nature of the sensor data. Researchers have proposed a number of protocols and schemes for this purpose. He et al. (INFOCOM 2007) have proposed a protocol - called CPDA - for carrying out additive data aggregation in a privacy-preserving manner for application in WSNs. The scheme has been quite popular and well-known. In spite of the popularity of this protocol, it has been found that the protocol is vulnerable to attack and it is also not energy-efficient. In this paper, we first present a brief state of the art survey on the current privacy-preserving data aggregation protocols for WSNS. Then we describe the CPDA protocol and identify its security vulnerability. Finally, we demonstrate how the protocol can be made secure and energy efficient.