SAFED: secure and adaptive framework for edge-based data aggregation in IoT applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) generates huge amounts of data, thus, creating significant management and security challenges. To address these challenges, this paper presents a Secure and Adaptive Framework for Edge-based Data Aggregation (SAFED) in IoT applications. The proposed framework is simple and easy to implement in real life scenario. It includes five key components: IoT nodes, a Trusted Authority, Edge Devices, a Public Cloud, and a Control Center. IoT nodes encrypt and digitally sign their data, which is then authenticated by edge devices. Valid data is aggregated and forwarded to the public cloud for evaluation and storage. Based on requirements, the control center decrypts the aggregated data using its private key. Employing the Paillier cryptosystem for encryption and RSA for authentication, SAFED is fault-tolerant, maintaining functionality even if some IoT nodes fail. The model achieves an 81% improvement in energy efficiency compared to non-edge networks and reduces aggregation costs by 90% and 14% relative to Privacy-Preserving fault tolerant data aggregation (PPDA) and fog- enabled secure data aggregation (FESDA) schemes. Communication costs are also reduced by 44.8% and 2.4% compared to PPDA and FESDA. Moreover, the computational cost is reduced by approximately 95% and 30% compared to the PPDA and FESDA schemes. Additional evaluations, including metrics like end-to-end delay, encryption-decryption time, and fault-tolerant costs, demonstrate SAFED’s overall efficiency.