A Secure Data Forwarding Protocol for Data Statistic Services in Multi-Hop Marine Sensor Networks.

Homomorphic encryption always allows the linear arithmetic operations performed over the ciphertext and then returns equaling results as if the operations are taken over the original plaintext, which is always used for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks to keep the confidentiality of the data and cut down the transmission overhead of the ciphertext. In the marine sensor networks, sensors collect the multiple data such as temperature, salinity, pressure, and chlorophyll concentration in the ocean using a single hardware unit for further statistical analysis such as computing the mean and the variance and making regression analysis. However, directly using the homomorphic encryption cannot perform well in marine sensor data forwarding since the data need to turn to satellites or vessels as relays and be forwarded in multi-hop way. The data are not expected to be decrypted until arriving the final destinations. To tackle these issues, we design a secure data forwarding protocol based on the Paillier homomorphic encryption and multi-use proxy re-encryption. We also evaluate the computational overhead in term of the delay in the transmission and operation in various test beds. The experiment results show that the additional computational overhead brought by cryptographic operations could be minor and it has the merit of providing fixed data size passing through the multi-hop transmission.