PPDMIT: a lightweight architecture for privacy-preserving data aggregation in the Internet of Things

Data is generated over time by each device in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosphere. Recent years have seen a resurgence in interest in the IoT due to its positive impact on society. However, due to the automatic management of IoT devices, the possibility of disclosing sensitive information without user consent is high. A situation in which information should not be unintentionally disclosed to outside parties we do not trust, i.e., privacy-preservation. Additionally, IoT devices should share their data with others to perform data aggregation and provide high-level services. There is a trade-off between the amount of data utility and the amount of disclosure of data. This trade-off has been causing a big challenge in this field. To improve the efficiency of this trade-off rather than current studies, in this study, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation architecture, PPDMIT, that leverages Homomorphic Paillier Encryption (HPE), K-means, a One-way hash chain, and the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). We have found that the proposed privacy-preserving architecture achieves more efficient data aggregation than current studies and improves privacy preservation by utilizing extensive simulations. Moreover, we found that our proposed architecture is highly applicable to IoT environments while preventing unauthorized data disclosure. Specifically, our solution depicted an 8.096% improvement over LPDA and 6.508% over PPIOT. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.