Anonymous three-factor authenticated key agreement for wireless sensor networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in a variety of fields, and make people’s lives more convenient and efficient. However, WSNs are usually deployed in a harsh and insecure environment. Furthermore, sensors with limited hardware resources have a low capacity for data processing and communication. For these reasons, research on efficient and secure real-time authentication and key agreement protocols based on the characteristics of WSNs has gradually attracted the attention of academics. Although many schemes have been proposed, most of them cannot achieve all known security features with satisfactory performance, among which anonymity, N-Factor security, and forward secrecy are the most vulnerable. In order to solve these shortcomings, we propose a new lightweight and anonymous three-factor authentication scheme based on symmetric cryptographic primitives for WSNs. By using the automated security verification tool ProVerif, BAN-logic verification, and an informal security analysis, we prove that our proposed scheme is secure and realizes all known security features in WSNs. Moreover, we show that our proposed scheme is practical and efficient through the comparison of security features and performance.

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A Lightweight Secure User Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Security and Communication Networks ◽

10.1155/2019/2136506 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 ◽

pp. 1-17 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Jiaqing Mo ◽

Hang Chen

Keyword(s):

Wireless Sensor Networks ◽

Sensor Networks ◽

Secure Communication ◽

Key Agreement ◽

Wireless Channel ◽

Wireless Sensor ◽

Session Key ◽

Key Agreement Protocol ◽

Authentication Mechanism ◽

Three Factor

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have great potential for numerous domains of application because of their ability to sense and understand unattended environments. However, a WSN is subject to various attacks due to the openness of the public wireless channel. Therefore, a secure authentication mechanism is vital to enable secure communication within WSNs, and many studies on authentication techniques have been presented to build robust WSNs. Recently, Lu et al. analyzed the security defects of the previous ones and proposed an anonymous three-factor authenticated key agreement protocol for WSNs. However, we found that their protocol is vulnerable to some security weaknesses, such as the offline password guessing attack, known session-specific temporary information attack, and no session key backward secrecy. We propose a lightweight security-improved three-factor authentication scheme for WSNs to overcome the previously stated weaknesses. In addition, the improved scheme is proven to be secure under the random oracle model, and a formal verification is conducted by ProVerif to reveal that the proposal achieves the required security features. Moreover, the theoretical analysis indicates that the proposal can resist known attacks. A comparison with related works demonstrates that the proposed scheme is superior due to its reasonable performance and additional security features.

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