An Efficient and Adaptive Mutual Authentication Framework for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network-Based Applications

Pardeep Kumar,Sang-Gon Lee,Mika Ylianttila,Andrei Gurtov,Hoon-Jae Lee

doi:10.3390/s140202732

Abstract

Robust security is highly coveted in real wireless sensor network (WSN) applications since wireless sensors' sense critical data from the application environment. This article presents an efficient and adaptive mutual authentication framework that suits real heterogeneous WSN-based applications (such as smart homes, industrial environments, smart grids, and healthcare monitoring). The proposed framework offers: (i) key initialization; (ii) secure network (cluster) formation (i.e., mutual authentication and dynamic key establishment); (iii) key revocation; and (iv) new node addition into the network. The correctness of the proposed scheme is formally verified. An extensive analysis shows the proposed scheme coupled with message confidentiality, mutual authentication and dynamic session key establishment, node privacy, and message freshness. Moreover, the preliminary study also reveals the proposed framework is secure against popular types of attacks, such as impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, and information-leakage attacks. As a result, we believe the proposed framework achieves efficiency at reasonable computation and communication costs and it can be a safeguard to real heterogeneous WSN applications.

Highlights

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are intelligently integrated with the Internet and becoming popular sources of data fusion in real-world mission-critical applications
To address mutual authentication in WSNs-based applications, this paper introduces an efficient and adaptive mutual authentication framework that exploits the features of symmetric key cryptography and provides strong mutual authentication and strong key establishment, message confidentiality, node identity and location privacy, and message freshness
This paper further demonstrates the correctness of the proposed framework using Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, which is a quite popular logic for verifying mutual authentication and session-key establishment schemes [39,40]

Summary

Introduction

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are intelligently integrated with the Internet and becoming popular sources of data fusion in real-world mission-critical applications (e.g., smart homes, healthcare, power plants, homeland security, smart buildings, etc.). A real WSN application consists of heterogeneous sensor nodes (i.e., low-capacity nodes and high-capacity nodes) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. A low-capacity node, i.e., L-node, is a resource-constrained node (e.g., Telos [8], MicaZ [9], etc.) that has low bandwidth, less computation power, less memory, and low battery power [3]. Heterogeneous sensor networks are more efficient and practical in real-time applications

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion