A secure temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

With the development of wireless communication technology and sensor technology, the wireless sensor network (WSN) has been widely used in various applications, such as military surveillance, environment monitoring industry control, medical monitoring, and so on. In most of the cases, WSNs are deployed in unattended environment. So, these are more vulnerable to various attacks than traditional networks. To protect communications in WSNs, mutual authentication and key agreement schemes for WSNs have been studied widely. Recently, Xue et al. proposed a temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs and claimed their scheme could withstand various attacks. However, in this paper, we will point out that their scheme is vulnerable to the off-line password guessing attack, the user impersonation attack, the sensor node impersonation attack and the modification attack. To overcome weaknesses in Xue et al.'s scheme, we also propose a new temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs. Security analysis shows our scheme could overcome weaknesses in Xue et al.'s scheme. Performance analysis shows our scheme also has better performance. Therefore, our scheme is more suitable for providing secure communication in WSNs.