Concealed Data Aggregation for Reverse Multicast Traffic in Sensor Networks: Encryption, Key Distribution, and Routing Adaptation

Routing in wireless sensor networks is different from that in commonsense mobile ad-hoc networks. It mainly needs to support reverse multicast traffic to one particular destination in a multihop manner. For such a communication pattern, end-to-end encryption is a challenging problem. To save the overall energy resources of the network, sensed data needs to be consolidated and aggregated on its way to the final destination. We present an approach that 1) conceals sensed data end-to-end by 2) still providing efficient and flexible in-network data aggregation. The aggregating intermediate nodes are not required to operate on the sensed plaintext data. We apply a particular class of encryption transformations and discuss techniques for computing the aggregation functions "average" and "movement detection." We show that the approach is feasible for the class of "going down" routing protocols. We consider the risk of corrupted sensor nodes by proposing a key predistribution algorithm that limits an attacker\´s gain and show how key predistribution and a key-ID sensitive "going down" routing protocol help increase the robustness and reliability of the connected backbone