Analysis of the End-by-Hop Protocol for Secure Aggregation in Sensor Networks

In order to save bandwidth and thus battery power, sensor network measurements are sometimes aggregated en-route while being reported back to the querying server. Authentication of the measurements then becomes a challenge if message integrity is important for the application. At ESAS 2007, the End-by-Hop protocol for securing in-network aggregation for sensor nodes was presented. The solution was claimed to be secure and efficient and to provide the possibility of trading off bandwidth against computation time on the server. In this paper, we disprove these claims. We describe several attacks against the proposed solution and point out shortcomings in the original complexity analysis. In particular, we show that the proposed solution is inferior to a naive solution without in-network aggregation both in security and in efficiency

Provably Secure Framework for Information Aggregation in Sensor Networks (Full version)

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.