An Energy Efficient Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme Preserving Anonymity for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Yanrong Lu,Haipeng Peng,Yixian Yang,Lixiang Li

doi:10.3390/s16060837

Abstract

WSNs (Wireless sensor networks) are nowadays viewed as a vital portion of the IoTs (Internet of Things). Security is a significant issue in WSNs, especially in resource-constrained environments. AKA (Authentication and key agreement) enhances the security of WSNs against adversaries attempting to get sensitive sensor data. Various AKA schemes have been developed for verifying the legitimate users of a WSN. Firstly, we scrutinize Amin-Biswas’s currently scheme and demonstrate the major security loopholes in their works. Next, we propose a lightweight AKA scheme, using symmetric key cryptography based on smart card, which is resilient against all well known security attacks. Furthermore, we prove the scheme accomplishes mutual handshake and session key agreement property securely between the participates involved under BAN (Burrows, Abadi and Needham) logic. Moreover, formal security analysis and simulations are also conducted using AVISPA(Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) to show that our scheme is secure against active and passive attacks. Additionally, performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is secure and efficient to apply for resource-constrained WSNs.

Highlights

With the advancement of short range radio communication coupled with advances in miniaturization of computing devices, WSNs (Wireless sensor networks) have drawn continuing attention from both academia and industrial areas due to its deployment scalability, power consumption constraint and wide applications
In order to allow remote authorized users to access reliable sensor nodes which have been verified as legitimate ones, mutual AKA (Authentication and key agreement) between communicating entities is required in the scheme design
The results shows that the computational cost of the user and the gateway node are considered to be taken on more than sensor node part due to its resource constrained environment

Summary

Introduction

With the advancement of short range radio communication coupled with advances in miniaturization of computing devices, WSNs (Wireless sensor networks) have drawn continuing attention from both academia and industrial areas due to its deployment scalability, power consumption constraint and wide applications. Within the infrastructure of WSNs, privacy and security are the two major challenges since nodes are generally deployed in hostile environments making the nodes vulnerable to attacks. From this context, secure information exchange over an untrusted network is a widely discussed issue in WSNs. In order to allow remote authorized users to access reliable sensor nodes which have been verified as legitimate ones, mutual AKA (Authentication and key agreement) between communicating entities is required in the scheme design. An AKA scheme for WSNs is composed of three classes of entity: users, sensor nodes and a gateway node (GWN), and has registration, login, authentication and key agreement, and password change phases. Among different kinds of cryptographic primitives (RSA [4], ECC [5,6] Elgamal [7] etc.) utilized in AKA for WSNs, lower computational cost

Objectives

Results

Conclusion