Aggregate MAC based authentication for secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks perform in-network processing to reduce the energy consumption caused by redundant communication. At the same time, its hostile deployment and unreliable communication raise the security concerns. Thus, there is a need to blend security and data aggregation together to provide secure data aggregation. Secure data aggregation becomes challenging if end-to-end privacy is desired. Privacy homomorphism is used to achieve both en route aggregation and end-to-end privacy of sensor readings. However, privacy homomorphism is inherently malleable. Using privacy homomorphism, one can modify the ciphertext without decrypting it. Thus, it becomes extremely crucial to ensure authentication along with privacy. Symmetric key based Message Authentication Code (MAC) is an efficient solution to provide authentication. In this paper, we use Aggregate Message Authentication Codes (AMAC) to reduce the transmission cost incurred by MAC. However, conflicting requirements of AMAC and data aggregation make its usage limited for certain scenarios. In this paper, we present a cluster based scenario where we can apply AMAC to reduce the number of bits transmitted for authentication. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.