Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Volume 2018 (2018), Article ID 9140937, 8 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9140937

Research Article

Secure and Efficient Cluster-Based Range Query Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Liming Zhou,¹ Yingzi Shan,² and Lu Chen¹

¹School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China
²Department of Finance, Yellow River Conservancy Technical Institute, Kaifeng 475004, China

Correspondence should be addressed to Liming Zhou; lmzhou@henu.edu.cn

Received 2 February 2018; Revised 10 July 2018; Accepted 18 July 2018; Published 2 October 2018

Academic Editor: Stefano Vitturi

Copyright © 2018 Liming Zhou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract.

In wireless sensor networks, preserving privacy is more important and has attracted more attentions. Protecting data and sensor privacy while collecting and computing query results is a challenge. In cluster-based sensor networks, when a user queries a sensitive data, the adversaries can monitor original node or gain the data in cluster node. To deal with this problem, we propose a secure and efficient scheme for cluster-based query processing in wireless sensor networks. To preserve location privacy of sensors, we use anonymity method to confuse adversaries. To protect the sensitive data, we use prefix membership verification method to prevent adversaries from gaining sensitive messages collected by sensor nodes. And we analyze the security and communication cost. The results show that our scheme can efficiently protect privacy in query processing.

1. Introduction

Wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed in various applications, such as monitoring environment, collecting temperature data, and gaining information of battlefield. Each sensor node transmits sensed data to a base station for further processing. In some applications, clustering method has been extensively studied [1] and used to organize sensor nodes, which has been considered as a useful approach. And some nodes are grouped into clusters such that sensor node sends data to a cluster head in the same cluster. Many clustering applications aimed at enhancing the energy efficiency and extending the network lifetime in wireless sensor networks.

In wireless sensor networks, when sensor nodes collect information in our daily life, we should pay attention to protect data privacy and security. For instance, a user wants to query sensitive data from a certain sensor node according to his interests. The sensor network may leak private information about the user’s interests to an adversary who can gain the content from the queried data. Meanwhile, the adversary can monitor the frequency of query to analyze the user’s preferences and find the related sensor nodes. Then the adversary may attack and compromise the related nodes. And the compromised node may respond to a query and send fake data to the user, which is in conflict with the privacy requirement. So query processing brings serious security challenges.

When users monitor events or analyze sensed data, data query becomes an important operation in wireless sensor networks. Recently, many existing privacy techniques can be employed in sensor network scenarios. For example, a target region transformation technique [2], range query [3–6], and top-k query [7, 8] have been well addressed. However, these schemes are not suitable for cluster-based query processing in wireless sensor networks. And many techniques do not consider the computing power, power of sensors, and capacity, which are the limiting factors in wireless sensor networks. For limited availability resources, it is important to make the trade-off between the privacy preservation and the communication overhead.

Based on the above discussions, in this paper, we propose a novel cluster-based privacy preserving query processing in wireless sensor networks. We consider the privacy issue when processing data query in wireless sensor networks. If a user wants to gain and query information from the cluster-based sensor network, we will use the anonymity method and the prefix membership verification scheme [9, 10] to protect the sensitive data against adversaries. When a cluster head receives a query message, the cluster head will randomly choose several cluster members which include the real queried node. So, it is unlikely that the adversary can monitor the real frequency of query in a cluster. Therefore, the adversary cannot gain the user’s interests from analyzing the frequency of query or find the location of the real source node. Meanwhile, cluster members encode their sensed data and send them to their cluster head. The cluster heads can correctly process data queries over encoded data without knowing their real values. And an adversary cannot know the query results in the cluster heads. In our scheme, we make a balance between data confidentiality and query efficiency.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives the related work and the previous proposed techniques for data query. In Section 3, we describe the system model and the security model. Then, we present our secure and efficient cluster-based query processing scheme in Section 4. In Section 5, we present the security analysis and performance analysis. Finally, we have the conclusion in Section 6.

2. Related Work

Protecting querying region’s privacy in wireless sensor networks has been drawn attention recently [2]. In [2], a querying region transformation technique is proposed to fuzzy the target region of the query according to predefined transformation functions. The transformation function maps one region into m regions so that the target region cannot be distinguished from the other uninteresting regions. Meanwhile, multiple transformation functions include uniform, randomized, and hybrid function.

A secure and efficient range query processing scheme is proposed in [6], called SafeQ. They use the prefix membership verification and neighborhood chains to encode both data and queries such that a storage node can correctly process encoded queries over encoded data without knowing their values. The prefix membership verification converts the verifications of whether a number is in a range to several verifications of whether two numbers are equal. The neighborhood chains allow a sink to verify whether the result of a query contains exactly the data items that satisfy the query. The SafeQ scheme can preserve privacy and integrity for processing range queries in two-tiered sensor networks.

Privacy preserving range query has been widely studied in two-tiered wireless sensor networks. Many range query schemes are proposed to protect privacy of range queries. CSRQ [3] employs an encoding mechanism and encrypted constraint chain to preserve data privacy and query result integrity. In [11], Zhang et al. provided an efficient secure range query protocol. In their scheme, different sensor nodes have different hash functions to encode data items for the protection of data privacy, and the correlation among data is used for verification of result.

In [12, 13], two optimized versions which verify query result completeness to reduce the communication overhead between sensors and storage nodes based on the bucketing technique are proposed. In their scheme, a bit map is broadcasted by each sensor node to the nearby sensors, which indicates which buckets have data. In each sensor node, the collected data items and the received bit maps are encrypted together. The sink can verify the completeness of the query result for a sensor by examining the bit maps. But the compromised storage nodes can estimate the values of data items by using the bucketing technique to achieve data privacy.

Privacy preserving max/min query schemes in two-tiered sensor networks are proposed in [14–17], which use the prefix membership verification scheme to privately compute the maximum or minimum data item. But their schemes cannot be suitable for cluster-based sensor networks. The power and storage are limited in cluster heads.

3. Network and Adversary Models

3.1. Network Model

Sensor networks consist of a number of different types of sensor nodes that have been deployed to monitor environment or collect data and send information to the sink in an area. Nodes are organized into clusters. A cluster head is selected in each cluster to receive and query data from cluster members. In each cluster, every sensor sends data to its cluster head. The sink collects data with a lot of resources in storage, energy, and computation.

In this paper, we assume that sensor nodes are evenly deployed in the sensor network and do not move after being deployed. All of the sensors have roughly the same capabilities, power sources, and expected lifetimes. The users can access the sensor network by the sink. The sink translates a query from a user into multiple queries which are sent to the cluster heads. The cluster heads process the queries and return the query results to the sink. All query results are sent to the sink which changes all results into a final query result and sends the final result back to the user. When a user makes a query request, the sink will send query request to each cluster head. The cluster heads collect all results and send them back to the sink. The results are forwarded through certain routing strategies that adopted the sensor networks.

3.2. Adversary Model

For various kinds of wireless sensor networks, we assume that an adversary is a motivated and funded attacker whose objective is to learn sensitive data information. The adversary has unbounded energy resource, adequate computation capability, and sufficient memory of data storage. The adversary can use the leaked sensitive data to threaten the sensor network, such as health monitoring networks. For a user’s query, the adversary tries to generate fake message and send it back to the user.

Meanwhile, the adversary wants to gain the user’s interests and the frequency of query in clusters. He wants to find the location information of queried nodes. The adversary may stay nearby the cluster to monitor and eavesdrop constantly. When the adversary monitors a message in a cluster, he will know the location of a sensor node. If the frequency of transmitted messages is large, the adversary will find that certain sensor node is important for the user. When the adversary compromises the sensor node, the compromised node will send fake data to the user.

4. Secure and Efficient Cluster-Based Query Processing Scheme

In this section, we propose a scheme for preserving privacy query processing in cluster-based sensor networks. Each cluster head collects the data from sensor nodes in a cluster. To preserve privacy, sensor nodes encrypt or encode their collected data, for example, DES algorithm. So the adversary cannot gain the content of transmitted data.

4.1. The Basic Idea

In order to preserve privacy query processing, we propose a secure and efficient cluster-based query processing scheme to address this problem in wireless sensor networks. After the sensor network is deployed, the cluster heads are randomly chosen. Then the cluster heads broadcast their join messages. When a node firstly receives a join message from a cluster head, it will reply to the cluster head and join the cluster. The cluster head will record the sensor’s ID. Meanwhile, the sink will record all cluster heads’ ID.

However, if a cluster head has the less remaining energy, it will randomly select one of its members as the new cluster head in the cluster. And the new cluster head will record the ID of all members in the cluster. Then, the sink will replace the ID of the previous cluster head with the ID of the new cluster head.

When a user wants to gain the value of a sensor node , he will make a query to the sink. The sink will send the query message to the cluster head which includes the sensor node . The cluster head will randomly select several cluster members which include the real queried node and gain the sensed data from them. It is aimed for preventing the adversary from monitoring the real frequency of the query in a cluster. We assume that each sensor shares a secret key with the sink in a network. A sensor encrypts its sensed data items using key in time slot , the result of which is denoted as . Then, encode as . Moreover, sends the message that includes the encrypted data and the encoded data to its cluster head. The cluster head transmits the message to the sink. When the user wants to perform query , the sink encodes the range as . Then, the sink applies a secret comparing method to be used for query processing over encrypted and encoded data. A data is in range if and only if is true. Then, the sink decides whether should be included in the query result. Meanwhile, given and , it is infeasible for the sink to compute . This condition can guarantee query privacy. Figure 1 illustrates the basic idea of cluster-based query processing scheme.

Figure 1: The cluster-based query processing scheme.

4.2. Prefix Membership Verification

We protect privacy query processing by using the prefix membership verification scheme which is first introduced in [8] and later formalized in [9]. In the prefix membership verification scheme, the key idea is to convert the verification of whether a number is in a range to several verifications of whether two numbers are equal. A is in the form of , which has leading 0s and 1s, followed by ∗s. For instance, 101∗ is a 3-prefix and it denotes the range [1010, 1011].

A prefix family consists of bits binary number , which is defined as the set of prefixes , where the ith prefix is . The prefix family of is denoted as . For example, the prefix family of number 11 is . In prefix membership verification scheme, for any number and prefix , if and only if .

In order to confirm whether a number is in a range , the range can be translated into a minimum set of prefixes, denoted as , the union of which is equal to . Each prefix is a subrange of , which follows the binary prefix format. For , the number of prefixes in is at most [18], where and are two numbers of bits. For example, . We compute the prefix family of number and translate the range into a minimum set of prefixes . So, if and only if .

In order to ensure whether, we use the operations of verifying whether two numbers are equal. Then, we convert each prefix to a corresponding unique number using the prefix numericalization scheme defined in [19]. A prefix numericalization function needs to satisfy the following properties: (1) for any , is a binary string; (2) for any two prefixes and , if and only if .Given a prefix of bits, we insert 1 after , then every ∗ is replaced by 0. Given a set of prefixes , the resulting set of numericalized prefixes is denoted as . For example, and . Therefore, if and only if . For instance, , the number 11 is in the range [9, 15]. Figure 2 shows the process of .

Figure 2: Prefix membership verification.

4.3. Data Collection

In order to preserve sensitive data, sensor nodes send the sensed data to cluster heads and sink by a secure way. We assume that and , respectively, denote the lower bound and the upper bound, the values of which are known to both sensors and the sink. And we assume that sensor collects data item at a time slot , and each data is in the range . When each sensor node collects data, sends the sensitive data by the following steps:

(1)Sort the data, , and in an ascending order. We assume .(2)Convert the ranges to the corresponding prefix string, that is, compute .(3)Numericalize all prefixes. For example, compute .(4)Compute the keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC) [6, 20] of each data item in numericalize prefixes using key , which is shared by all nodes and the sink. An HMAC function using key is denoted as . Compute .(5)Encrypt every data item to using key .(6)Sensor sends the following packet to its cluster head (CH): .

Because the HMAC function has the one-wayness and collision resistance properties, and data items are encrypted, the cluster head cannot obtain the real values of all data items.

4.4. Filter and Query Processing

When a cluster head receives collected packets from cluster members in a cluster, the cluster head will filter the packet by sensors’ id. In the query phase, the cluster head randomly selects several cluster members which include the real queried node and gain the sensed data from them. It is aimed for preventing the adversary from monitoring the real frequency of query in a cluster. Therefore, in the submission phase, the cluster head needs to filter out the useless packets and obtain the real packet. Then, the cluster head transmits the real packet to the sink.

In the sink, it firstly converts the query range and computes prefix families and . After the sink numericalize all prefixes as and , it applies to each numericalized prefix as and . When the sink receives a packet from cluster heads, it will process the packet based on the query range using the following theorem [21].

Theorem 1. Given numbers sorted in the ascending order , where , and a range if and only if there exist such that the following two conditions hold:

(1)(2)

According to Theorem 1, the sink selects the smallest and the largest such that and . If , the data items are in the range ; if , no data item is in the range .

Based on the aforementioned description, Algorithm 1 shows a secure and efficient cluster-based query processing scheme. When a user wants to gain and check whether sensed data of certain node is in the range at a time slot , the user will send a query message to the sink. And then the sink relays the message to a cluster head which include the queried node. In the cluster head, it randomly chooses several nodes which include the queried node. In the collection and submission phase, when the node collects the sensed data, it will process the data using the PMV and HMAC schemes. Then, the node sends the secure packet to the cluster head. After the cluster head filters out the useless packets, it sends the useful packet to the sink. Finally, the sink processes the packet and sends the final result to the user.

(1)
initial_cluster;

(2)
sink_node;

(3)
query_node_id;

(4)
CH = cluster_head;

(5)
query_range = [a,b];

(6)
query_msg = QueryMsg(query_node_id, sink_node, query_range);

(7)
if sink receives the query_msg then

(8)
    SendQueryMsgToCH(CH, query_node_id);

(9)
    if CH receives the query_msg then

(10)
        selected_nodes = SelectNodesRandom(query_node_id);

(11)
        for node in selected_nodes then

(12)
             = CollectData();

(13)
            Sort , and as

(14)
            Compute prefixes and numericalize all prefixes as                 

(15)
                Compute the HMAC as

(16)
            Encrypt by as ;

(17)
            Send packet to CH

(18)
        end for

(19)
        packet = FilterPackets();

(20)
        SendToSink(packet);

(21)
    end if

(22)
    Compute and encode [a,b] as ;

(23)
    GetQueryData(packet, );

(24)
end if

Algorithm 1: Secure and efficient cluster-based query processing.

5. Performance Analysis

In order to protect privacy, we propose a secure and efficient query processing scheme to prevent an adversary from obtaining the sensitive data or finding the user’s interests and location of sensor node in cluster-based sensor networks. In this section, we present the privacy analysis and communication overhead analysis. From the following analysis, we can see that our scheme brings a better network security and minimal communication overhead.

5.1. Privacy Analysis

For privacy of collected data, according to the data collection phase, sensor nodes convert the collected data by using encryption and HMAC scheme. So, the submitted information is not plaintext but encrypted and HMAC data. The HMAC function has one-wayness and collision resistance properties. And sensor nodes only share the secret key with the sink and encrypt sensitive data by the key. Therefore, it is computationally infeasible for cluster heads to obtain the value of . It is difficult for the cluster head to break the privacy and gain the encryption and HMAC data. So, our scheme can efficiently protect collected data items.

For privacy of the query result, the sink obtains the query result by comparing the HMAC data items. For the HMAC data items and encrypted data, it is difficult for the adversary for computing and obtaining the values of the query result without keys. So, we can preserve the query result which is securely transmitted to the user.

For privacy of user’s interests and location privacy of sensors in clusters, our scheme can efficiently preserve privacy information to prevent an adversary from monitoring user’s interests and find the location information of sensors. And the adversary cannot use the content to trace the routing. We assume that an adversary monitors a local area with the intention of finding the interests of the user. We assume that each cluster has members. The adversary wants to identify a set of nodes which represent the set of possible location in the local area. There is a close relationship between the analysis of query frequency of the adversary and the location privacy. When the adversary analyzes the query frequency uncertainly, it is secure to preserve the location information. In the eavesdropping area, the adversary will need to select the nodes of his analysis. We assume that the possible sensor nodes in include queried nodes which send data to cluster head. If the size of is very large, the adversary will find it difficult to analyze the user’s interests. So, it is useful for preserving privacy information.

Let be the set of the protected nodes. We use information-theoretic metric, called entropy [22], to measure the privacy protection provided by our scheme. The entropy of identifying the queried node in the wireless sensor network is defined as

where is the probability that node is the queried node, is the number of uncertain nodes by the adversary, and . Therefore, the probability of any sensor nodes in being queried nodes can be estimated by . Then, we denote the size of as . And let be the size of the protected queried node’s set . And we define the privacy as

The entropy represents the adversary’s uncertainty about the user’s interests and the location of sensors in a wireless sensor network. When the adversary believes that the nodes have the same probability to be the queried node in a cluster, the entropy is maximum value. Let be the set of all nodes in a cluster and . We know that the size of can influence the level of privacy. Therefore, the entropy is

Figure 3 shows the relationship between the level of privacy and the different number of nodes in a cluster. When increases, the level of privacy is higher. This is due to the increased number of nodes in a cluster. The probability that the adversary finds the protected queried nodes is decreased. So the level of privacy increases. For the same , when is greater than 20, we can see that the number of protected queried nodes increases, the level of privacy increases.

Figure 3: The different number of nodes in a cluster.

5.2. Energy Consumption Analysis

In cluster-based sensor networks, sensor nodes have limited energy resource. In this section, we discuss the energy consumption of sensor nodes in our scheme. In each phase, the total energy consumption includes the communication cost and computation energy consumption. We assume that the energy consumed by transmitting and receiving a data are and . And we assume that a cluster head randomly chooses nodes to query.

In the data collection phase, sensor nodes will have extra computation overhead to preserve privacy of sensitive data. Given a range , where and are two numbers of bits, the number of prefixes in is at most [18]. So a sensor computes at most HMAC data. When a sensor node sends data to cluster head, it generates extra communication cost by sending encrypted data and HMAC data. We assume that each HMAC data is bits and encrypted data is bits. Let be the hop between a sensor node and a cluster head. In our scheme, . In a cluster, the energy consumption is

In the query processing phase, the sink node computes the range and converts prefix families and . For each value in the bits, there are HMAC data items. So, the sink can perform at most comparisons. The energy consumption is

Therefore, the total energy consumption is

According to (3) and (6), Figure 4 shows the total energy expended in the systems as the prefix number bits increase from 8 bits to 32 bits and the energy expended in the level of privacy increases from 1 to 45, for the scenario where each HMAC data and encrypted data are 256 bits. We assume that each sensor collects 100 data items at each time slot. And we assume that the energy consumed by transmitting and receiving a data are 1. Each cluster head includes 100 sensor nodes. This shows that when the prefix number bits is the same, the higher level of privacy can increase the energy of the whole sensor network.

Figure 4: The relationship between energy consumption and the level of privacy.

6. Conclusions

Wireless sensor networks have been widely deployed in many applications and drawn more attentions. It is an important problem to preserve the privacy of sensitive data in cluster-based query processing in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient scheme to protect query processing in cluster-based sensor networks. In order to preserve privacy, sensed data items are encrypted to prevent cluster heads from obtaining the content of data. We use the prefix membership verification method to query the result without plaintext data. Meanwhile, we use anonymity method to confuse adversaries and prevent adversaries from analyzing the user’s interests and finding location of the queried node. Then, we perform the privacy analysis and energy consumption analysis.

Data Availability

The data used to support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper and confirm that the mentioned received funding in the acknowledgments did not lead to any conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this manuscript.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NSFC (Grant no. 61402015), the Science and Technology Development Plan Project of Henan Province (Grant no. 172102210189), and the Research Fund Project of Henan University (Grant no. 2016YBZR019).

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