An Authentication-Based Secure Data Aggregation Method in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) means connecting different devices through the Internet. The Internet of things enables humans to remotely manage and control the objects they use with the Internet infrastructure. After the advent of the Internet of Things in homes, organizations, and private companies, privacy and information security are the biggest concern. This issue has challenged the spread of the Internet of things as news of the user's theft of information by hackers intensified. The proposed method in this paper consists of three phases. In the first phase, a star structure is constructed within each cluster, and a unique key is shared between each child and parent to encrypt and secure subsequent communications. The second phase is for intra-cluster communications, in which members of the cluster send their data to the cluster head in a multi-hop manner. Also, in this phase, the data is encrypted with different keys in each hop, and at the end of each connection, the keys are updated to ensure data security. The third phase is to improve the security of inter-cluster communications using an authentication protocol. In this way, the cluster heads are authenticated before sending information to prevent malicious nodes in the network. The proposed method is also simulated using NS2 software. The results showed that the proposed method has improved in terms of energy consumption, end-to-end delay, flexibility, packet delivery rate, and the number of alive nodes compared to other methods.