Protecting Data Integrity for Multi-Application Environment in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), homomorphic encryption has been used in WSNs to conceal data aggregation by achieving end-to-end confidentiality for a single-application environment. Especially, the concealed data aggregation scheme for multiple applications (CDAMA) was proposed in order to aggregate the ciphertexts from multiple applications. However, confidentiality of data aggregation in CDAMA scheme does not protect data from some WSN attacks, since an adversary is still able to distribute some false information to change the data. For this reason, we integrate a technique using message authentication code (MAC) protocol into CDAMA scheme to detect and drop false data sooner for protecting data integrity when data is aggregated and forwarded, and to overcome any bogus data in the network early for reducing the cost of communication overhead and avoiding base station deception. Computer simulation results show that our scheme has the capability of detecting and eliminating false data during data aggregation and transmission in WSNs. Also, the simulation shows that our proposed scheme improves the data transmission about 50% compared to CDAMA in the presence of false data injection attack.