An energy-efficient and scalable slot-based privacy homomorphic encryption scheme for WSN-integrated networks

Abstract

With the advent of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and its immense popularity in a wide range of applications, security has been a major concern for these resource-constraint systems. Alongside security, WSNs are currently being integrated with existing technologies such as the Internet, satellite, Wi-Max, Wi-Fi, etc. in order to transmit data over long distances and hand-over network load to more powerful devices. With the focus currently being on the integration of WSNs with existing technologies, security becomes a major concern. The main security requirement for WSN-integrated networks is providing end-to-end security along with the implementation of in-processing techniques of data aggregation. This can be achieved with the implementation of Homomorphic encryption schemes which prove to be computationally inexpensive since they have considerable overheads. This paper addresses the ID-issue of the commonly used Castelluccia Mykletun Tsudik (CMT) [12] homomorphic scheme by proposing an ID slotting mechanism which carries information pertaining to the security keys responsible for the encryption of individual sensor data. The proposed scheme proves to be 93.5% lighter in terms of induced overheads and 11.86% more energy efficient along with providing efficient WSN scalability compared to the existing scheme. The paper provides analytical results comparing the proposed scheme with the existing scheme thus justifying that the modification to the existing scheme can prove highly efficient for resource-constrained WSNs.