2nd International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services

Research Article

Efficient aggregation of encrypted data in wireless sensor networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/MOBIQUITOUS.2005.25,
        author={ C.  Castelluccia and E.  Mykletun and  G.   Tsudik},
        title={Efficient aggregation of encrypted data in wireless sensor networks},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS},
        year={2005},
        month={11},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/MOBIQUITOUS.2005.25}
    }
    
  • C. Castelluccia
    E. Mykletun
    G. Tsudik
    Year: 2005
    Efficient aggregation of encrypted data in wireless sensor networks
    MOBIQUITOUS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/MOBIQUITOUS.2005.25
C. Castelluccia1, E. Mykletun1, G. Tsudik1
  • 1: INRIA, Cedex, France

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ad-hoc networks composed of tiny devices with limited computation and energy capacities. For such devices, data transmission is a very energy-consuming operation. It thus becomes essential to the lifetime of a WSN to minimize the number of bits sent by each device. One well-known approach is to aggregate sensor data (e.g., by adding) along the path from sensors to the sink. Aggregation becomes especially challenging if end-to-end privacy between sensors and the sink is required. In this paper, we propose a simple and provably secure additively homomorphic stream cipher that allows efficient aggregation of encrypted data. The new cipher only uses modular additions (with very small moduli) and is therefore very well suited for CPU-constrained devices. We show that aggregation based on this cipher can be used to efficiently compute statistical values such as mean, variance and standard deviation of sensed data, while achieving significant bandwidth gain.