Verifiable and Fault-Tolerant Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation for MEC-Enabled Consumer IoT
The consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) enables large-scale sensing and data-driven services by connecting billions of devices. However, the privacy-preserving data aggregation in mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled CIoT remains challenging when the edge aggregator is malicious, rather than simply honest-but-curious. Specifically, a malicious MEC server can selectively drop user reports or tamper with ciphertexts, undermining data integrity and ownership. To address this, we propose a verifiable and fault-tolerant privacy-preserving aggregation scheme. By substituting computationally intensive homomorphic encryption (HE) with a double-masking mechanism and integrating bilinear pairing-based accumulators, the proposed scheme provides resilience against tampering and deletion attacks while ensuring data privacy. The design supports user dropouts within a single reporting round without requiring interactive recovery, enabling each device to locally audit the inclusion of the corresponding ciphertext via a compact membership witness. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces communication overhead and payload size. It satisfies the security requirements of CIoT ecosystems and offers a practical tradeoff between security and efficiency for latency-sensitive deployments.