Asymmetric Concealed Data Aggregation Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

The wireless communication nature of remotely deployed sensor nodes make the attacks more easily to be happened in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). But traditional security algorithms are infeasible in WSNs due to the limited computing, communication power, storage, band width and energy of sensor nodes. So energy efficient secure data aggregation schemes are necessary in resource constrained WSNs. Concealed Data Aggregation (CDA) based on privacy homomorphism (PH) gives a critical solution for energy efficient secure data aggregation in WSNs. PH based algorithms allow aggregation to be happened on cipher texts. Thus, it eliminates the power consuming decryption operations at the aggregator node for the data aggregation and further encryption for the secure transmission of aggregated data. It also avoids the aggregator node from the burden of keeping the secret key information and thereby it achieves energy efficiency and reduces the frequency of node compromise attacks in aggregator nodes. Among the CDA techniques, asymmetric PH based CDA techniques are exploring due to their combination with elliptic curve cryptography having reduced key size. We present an overview of asymmetric concealed data aggregation techniques that achieve both end to end data confidentiality and non delayed data aggregation.