Data Security in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks through Aggregate Signcryption

In this paper, we propose aggregate signcryption for achieving data security in UWSNs. The main challenge of these networks established in sensitive environments is offline sink visiting. Moreover, the sensors must retain collected data for long enough time to offload them onto the itinerant sink. Thus, the unattended nature of data collection intervals might offer the adversary the opportunity to apply various attacks without detection. In this paper, employing low order operations (in time and space), we propose a new secure scheme in which various security goals such as confidentiality (through encrypting), authentication and integrity (through signing) are achieved. In addition, the aggregation process of our scheme reduces the space and communication overheads both for sensors and sink, i.e. the proposed technique efficiently enables the sensors and sink to protect, verify and recover all the related data. We further compare our scheme with the best alternative work in the literature.