Data aggregation is an efficient method to reduce the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, data aggregation schemes pose challenges in ensuring data privacy in WSN because traditional encryption schemes cannot support data aggregation. Homomorphic encryption schemes are promising techniques to provide end to end data privacy in WSN. Data reliability is another main issue in WSN due to the errors introduced by communication channels. In this paper, a symmetric additive homomorphic encryption scheme based on Rao-Nam scheme is proposed to provide data confidentiality during aggregation in WSN. This scheme also possess the capability to correct errors present in the aggregated data. The required security levels can be achieved in the proposed scheme through channel decoding problem by embedding security in encoding matrix and error vector. The error vectors are carefully designed so that the randomness properties are preserved while homomorphically combining the data from different sensor nodes. Extensive cryptanalysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure against all attacks reported against private-key encryption schemes based on error correcting codes. The performance of the encryption scheme is compared with the related schemes, and the results show that the proposed encryption scheme outperforms the existing schemes. KEYWORDSdata aggregation, data confidentiality, homomorphic encryption, Rao-Nam encryption, wireless sensor network INTRODUCTIONWith the advancement of Internet of things (IoT), the popularity of wireless sensor networks (WSN) has increased tremendously. WSNs support a wide variety of applications ranging from military to civilian. WSN consists of a large collection of sensor nodes (SNs) that have limited capabilities to sense, process, and communicate the data. Because SNs are energy constrained devices, it is inefficient to send the collected data from sensors directly to the sink. Moreover, in many scenarios, the sink only needs the derivative of collected data such as sum, mean, variance, etc instead of the exact value from all sensors. Data aggregation techniques help to achieve this goal in an energy efficient manner. 1 Data privacy is a major challenge in WSN, and it will become further complicated by the adoption of data aggregation methods. This is due to the fact that if traditional encryption schemes are used to preserve the privacy of the data sent from Int J Commun Syst. 2019;32:e3832.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac

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