Two-Levels Verification for Secure Data Aggregation in Resource-Constrained Environments

Many resource-constrained applications make use of data aggregation in order to prolong the network lifetime. However, the resource-constrained devices are usually deployed in unattended environments in which providing security is of paramount importance. This leads to various attacks that can occur during data aggregation process. Internal attacks such as selective forwarding represent the most dangerous ones since they cannot be detected by existing cryptography-based protocols proposed to secure data aggregation. In this work, we propose a two-levels verification, in which data is verified using cryptography and intrusion detection techniques. Indeed, a lightweight homomorphic encryption is combined with a game-theory based technique to efficiently secure data aggregation. Our analysis and results show the applicability of the system for aggregation-based resource-constrained applications, especially those considering sensitive information (e.g. health monitoring, military) where the time-efficient detection is crucial.