A Secure Compressive Sensing-Based Data Gathering System via Cloud Assistance

Wireless sensors have been helpful and popular for gathering information, in particular in harsh environments. Due to the limit of computation power and energy, compressive sensing has attracted considerable attention in achieving simultaneous sensing and compression of data on the sensor/encoder side with cheap cost. Nevertheless, along with the increase of the data size, the computation overhead for decoding becomes unaffordable on the user/decoder side. To overcome this problem, by taking advantage of resourceful cloud, it is helpful to leverage the overhead. In this paper, we propose a cloud-assisted compressive sensing-based data gathering system with security assurance. Our system, involving three parties of sensor, cloud, and user, possesses several advantages. First, in terms of security, for any two data that are sparse in certain transformed domain, their corresponding ciphertexts are indistinguishable on the cloud side. Second, to avoid the communication bottleneck between the user and cloud, the sensor can encrypt data individually such that, once the cloud receives encrypted data from sensor, it can immediately carry out its task without requesting any information from the user. Third, we show that, even though the cloud knows the permuted support information of data, the security never is sacrificed. Meanwhile, the compression rate can be reduced further. Theoretical and empirical results demonstrate that our system is cost effective and privacy guaranteed and that it possesses acceptable reconstruction quality.