E-LEACH: Improving the LEACH protocol for privacy preservation in secure data aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) after their emergence have triggered many active research areas; not because of low-scale hardware design but also due to a wide spectrum of its potential applications being in day-to-day areas of our life. However, because of the ubiquitous and pervasive computing paradigm that the WSNs foster and because of the resource constrained characteristic, security & privacy issues therein assume critical investigation. Amongst many potential aspects of investigation, one has been the design of a secure routing protocol in which a value sensed to be delivered to an appropriate receiver securely and efficiently with least amount of energy consumption. We observe that LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is a popular clustering based protocol used in WSNs. However, the same lacks any security support. Amongst numerous improvements of LEACH suggested to incorporate security & privacy, we observe that none, to the best of our knowledge offers end-to-end privacy using the homomorphic encryption schemes. We propose here an improvement of LEACH viz. E-LEACH (end-to-end secure LEACH) which uses homomorphic encryption to provide secure data aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks. Due to the algebraic characteristics in homomorphic encryption, data can be algebraically aggregated without decryption and hence require least amount of energy, while ensuring privacy.