Post Quantum Security Solution for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation has been one of the most widely researched topics for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) as it helps in increasing the effective life time of the network and reduces the packet transmission overhead. Besides other challenges, security is one of the serious challenges during data aggregation. Numerous solutions on security for data aggregation for WSN are based on homomorphic encryption technique or Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based solutions and thus are vulnerable to attacks by quantum machines. This paper presents a post-quantum security solution using lattice cryptography. The proposed solution is applying Learning with Errors over Rings (R-LWE) for encryption of data in the data aggregation process at the gateway module of WSN. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme provides confidentiality, integrity and authenticity during communication. Performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is lightweight and shows better performance compared to Elliptic Curve Elgamal (ECEG) cryptography based scheme and symmetric homomorphic based scheme.

I. Introduction

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is one of the major domains of Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. Integration of WSN with other critical domains such as cloud systems has increased the importance of WSN. Large scale WSNs contain millions of sensors which sense the environmental conditions and accumulate the data at the base station. Cluster based topolgy is popular in WSNs [2] where the sensors are divided into clusters and each cluster is controlled by cluster head (CH) nodes. As shown in Figure 1, sensor nodes send the collected information to CHs. CHs collect the information from sensors, aggregates the data and send the aggregated data to the base station (BS). Aggregation at CH not only reduces the number of packet transfers in the network, but also helps in increasing the lifetime of the network.