A Novel Smart Card Based User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to the open environment in which hierarchical wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) are typically deployed, it is important to authenticate transmitted data. In recent years, a number of user authentication schemes with smart card for HWSNs have been proposed. In 2014, Turkanovic et al. proposed a novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks (HADWSNs). Their scheme is a lightweight, which requires the computation of only hash functions. In this paper, we first analyze Turkanovic et al.’s scheme and then demonstrate that their scheme cannot really protect against user masquerade, off-line password guessing, and node capture attacks. To overcome these security weaknesses, we further propose an advanced smart card based user authentication while inherits the original merits of their scheme. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we demonstrate that our scheme is resilient possible known attacks including the attacks found in Turkanovic et al.’s scheme. In addition, we compare the proposed scheme with related ones to prove that the computation cost of the proposed scheme are well suitable for practical applications in HADWSNs.