General secure sensor aggregation in the presence of malicious nodes

Sensor networks have the potential to allow users to “query the physical world” [1] by querying the sensor nodes for an aggregate result. However, a concern with such aggregation is that a few corrupt nodes in the network may manipulate the results that the querier sees. There has been a substantial amount of work on providing integrity for sensor network computations. However to the best of our knowledge, this prior work has one or more of the following two limitations: i) the methods only work for a specific aggregation function, or ii) the methods do not consider adversaries whose goal is to prevent the base station and the querier from receiving the result. In this paper we present the first scheme that provides general aggregation for sensor networks in the presence of malicious adversaries. The generality of the scheme results from the ability to securely evaluate any algorithm in the streaming model of computation. The main idea of this paper is to convert the commonly used aggregation tree into an aggregation list, and a process for doing this conversion is also presented. This result is an interesting and important first step towards achieving the realization of general secure querying of a sensor network.