Efficient security primitives derived from a secure aggregation algorithm

Abstract

By functionally decomposing a specific algorithm (the hierarchical secure aggregation algorithm of Chan et al. [3] and Frikken et al. [7]), we uncover a useful general functionality which we use to generate various efficient network security primitives, including: a signature scheme ensuring authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation for arbitrary node-to-node communications; an efficient broadcast authentication algorithm not requiring time synchronization; a scheme for managing public keys in a sensor network without requiring any asymmetric cryptographic operations to verify the validity of public keys, and without requiring nodes to maintain node revocation lists. Each of these applications uses the same basic data aggregation primitive and thus have O(log n) congestion performance and require only that symmetric secret keys are shared between each node and the base station. We thus observe the fact that the optimizations developed in the application area of secure aggregation can feed back into creating more optimized versions of highly general, basic security functions. Copyright 2008 ACM.