A Secure Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on DAC and Intel SGX

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely implemented in military, intelligent medical, intelligent transportation, space exploration, and other fields. However, the authentication and communication of WSNs are carried out in the harsh external environment via a public channel, which is more vulnerable to various attacks than the traditional networks. Authentication is the key technology of security measures, but a common authentication scheme is not suitable for WSNs due to limitations of memory, computing, and energy consumption. Therefore, designing a secure and efficient authentication scheme is essential in WSNs. In recent years, several studies proved that the dynamic authentication credential (DAC) is efficient for enhancing the security of the authentication scheme. This article designs a secure authentication scheme for WSNs based on DAC and Intel software guard extensions (SGX). Compared with other DAC authentication schemes, our scheme provides the confirmation action of DAC rotation, which can effectively prevent the asynchronous update problem caused by packet loss. In order to resist the privileged user attack and the authentication table leakage attack, we choose the SGX, which can protect the data in use, as the trusted execution environment in the gateway node, and we adopt SGX to store the master key for protecting the authentication table. Finally, the security of our authentication scheme is verified by BAN logic, the simulation tool AVISPA, and informal security analysis. Through the consumption overhead analysis, the NS3 simulation result, and detailed comparison with other recent schemes, we conclude that our scheme is practical and achieves better security with less overhead.