PIP: Privacy and Integrity Preserving Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the exponential rise of pervasive computing applications, data privacy has become much more of an important issue than before. When data is aggregated at each hop in a sensor network, it becomes harder to protect its privacy. A number of privacy preserving data aggregation algorithms have recently appeared for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), very few of them however also address the issue of data integrity along with privacy. Data privacy and integrity are two contrasting objectives to achieve in general. In a privacy preserved data aggregation, it becomes easier for an attacker to inject false data hence, we suggest that both privacy and integrity of data should be treated together. In this paper, we present an energy efficient, privacy preserving data aggregation algorithm which also preserves data integrity in WSNs. We analyze the security of the algorithm and provide proofs for confidentiality and integrity. We enhance this algorithm further to localize, to a certain degree, the corrupt aggregator. We provide the results of our implementation of the algorithm on TelosB motes, illustrating that both the computational overhead and the energy consumption are very low. Finally, we compare our algorithm with other schemes having similar objectives demonstrating that our algorithm performs better in terms of bandwith usage and energy consumption in a WSN environment.