Paper 2007/283

Provably Secure Framework for Information Aggregation is Sensor Networks

Mark Manulis and Joerg Schwenk

Abstract

Information aggregation is an important operation in wireless sensor networks executed for the purpose of monitoring and reporting of the environmental data. Due to the performance constraints of sensor nodes the in-network form of the aggregation is especially attractive since it allows to save expensive resources during the frequent network queries. Easy accessibility of networks and nodes and almost no physical protection against corruptions arise high challenges on the security of the aggregation process. Especially, protection against attacks aiming to falsify the aggregated result is considered to be of prime importance. In this paper we propose a novel security model for the aggregation process based on the well-established cryptographic techniques, focusing on the scenario with the single aggregator node. In order to show soundness and feasibility of our definitions we describe a generic practical approach that achieves security against node corruptions during the aggregation process in a provable cryptographic way based solely on the symmetric cryptographic primitives. To the best of our knowledge this is the first paper which aims to combine the paradigm of provable security in the cryptographic sense with the task of information aggregation in WSNs.

Note: A shorter version is published at "Computational Science and Its Applications (ICCSA 2007)", pp.603-621, LNCS 4705, Springer. A full version appears uner the title "Security Model and Framework for Information Aggregation in Sensor Networks" in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (ACM TOSN), in volume 5, issue 2, in 2009.