Publicly verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation and its application in IoT

Abstract With the development of smart devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has found wide applications and extended various services of Internet. On intermediate nodes and edge nodes of the IoT network, the aggregation primitive is a basic function for forwarding data, which takes data sources of other nodes as input. To protect sensitive information of source nodes while enabling the aggregation computations, some works presented corresponding secure protocols. However, the aggregation node could return invalid results due to transition failures, software bugs, or computation delays. Thus, how to verify the results is a big challenge of secure aggregation protocols. In this paper, we focus on the verification problem, and propose a new publicly verifiable scheme for the aggregation operation. Different from existing solutions, our scheme enables a public verifier to test an aggregation result on the data of source nodes while protecting the data privacy. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve the security properties. Finally, we provide the experimental evaluation that demonstrates the effectiveness of our scheme.