A secure and efficient three-factor multi-gateway authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is an important cryptographic tool for wireless sensor networks. Almost all of the known authentication protocols focus on the single gateway node, which is not suitable for the actual situation where the sensor nodes are widely distributed. Recently, Amin and Biswas (2016) [1] firstly proposed a multi-factor authentication and key agreement protocol for the multi-gateway wireless sensor networks in Ad Hoc Networks. Unfortunately, some security vulnerabilities in Amin and Biswas’s scheme were pointed out, and an improved scheme was presented by Wu et al. (2017) [2] very recently. By carefully analyzing, in this paper, we found that there are still some flaws in Wu et al.’s scheme. In addition, the scheme is inefficient in the password verification phase. This paper proposes a new secure and efficient authentication protocol for multi-gateway communication. The protocol introduces biological information and only requires hash and XOR calculations. BAN-logic is used to prove the security of the session key between users, sensors, and gateway nodes, and Real-or-Random model is used to formalize the security proof of the new protocol. Finally, through performance analysis, the new protocol is shown to be more efficient than other multi-factor multi-gateway authentication protocols.