A new sensitive data aggregation scheme for protecting integrity in wireless sensor networks

Since wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are resources-constrained, it is very essential to gather data efficiently so that the life of the networks can be prolonged. Data aggregation can conserve a significant amount of energy by minimizing the transmission costs in terms of the number of data packets. On the other hand, many applications require privacy of the sampled data protecting their integrity while they travel from the source sensor nodes to a data collecting device, say a query server. Thus, an efficient data aggregation scheme for preserving data privacy and integrity is required for WSNs. Although secure data aggregation in WSNs has been well studied in the recent past, there exists a little work, for instance iPDA (Integrity-Protecting Private Data Aggregation) scheme, which focuses on data aggregation, data privacy and integrity protection within a single application for WSNs. However, the iPDA scheme suffers from two major problems: high communication and high computation costs. To resolve the problems, we, in this paper, propose a new and efficient integrity protecting sensitive data aggregation scheme for WSNs. Our scheme makes use of the additive property of complex numbers to achieve sensitive data aggregation protecting data integrity. With our analytical performance evaluations, we show that our scheme is much more efficient in terms of both communication and computation overheads than the iPDA scheme for integrity and privacy preserving data aggregation in WSNs.