Boonsongsrikul Anuparp   Kyung Suk Lhee

Vol. 18,  No. 5, pp. 303-316, Oct.  2011
10.3745/KIPSTC.2011.18.5.303

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Data aggregation is important in wireless sensor networks. However, it also introduces many security problems, one of which is that a compromised node may inject false data or drop a message during data aggregation. Most existing solutions rely on encryption, which however requires high computation and communication cost. But they can only detect the occurrence of an attack without finding the attacking node. This makes sensor nodes waste their energy in sending false data if attacks occur repeatedly. Even an existing work can identify the location of a false data injection attack but it has a limitation that at most 50% of total sensor nodes can participate in data transmission. Therefore, a novel approach is required such that it can identify an attacker and also increase the number of nodes which participate in data transmission. In this paper, we propose a monitoring-based secure data aggregation protocol to prevent against a compromised aggregator which injects false data or drops a message. The proposed protocol consists of aggregation tree construction and secure data aggregation. In secure data aggregation, we use integration of abnormal data detection with monitoring and a minimal cryptographic technique. The simulation results show the proposed protocol increases the number of participating nodes in data transmission to 95% of the total nodes. The proposed protocol also can identify the location of a compromised node which injects false data or drops a message. A communication overhead for tracing back a location of a compromised node is O(n) where n is the total number of nodes and the cost is the same or better than other existing solutions.