Secure Authentication Technique for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Problem statement: In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), serious security threat is caused by node capture attacks where an adversary gains full control over a sensor node through direct physical access. Approach: This creates a high risk of data confidentiality. Results: We propose a secure authentication technique for data aggregation in WSN. During first round of data aggregation, the aggregator upon identifying the detecting nodes selects a set of nodes randomly and broadcast a unique value which contains their authentication keys, to the selected set of nodes. When any node within the set wants to send the data, it sends slices of data to other nodes in that set, encrypted with their respective authentication keys. Each receiving node decrypts, sums up the slices and sends the encrypted data to the aggregator. Conclusion/Recommendations: The aggregator aggregates and encrypts the data with the shared secret key of the sink and forwards it to the sink. In the second round of aggregation, the set of nodes is reselected with new set of authentication keys. By simulation results, we show that the proposed approach rectifies the security threat of node capture attacks.