Post Quantum Security Solution for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

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.