Cryptanalysis and improvement of an authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks applications like safety monitoring in coal mines

Abstract

The wireless sensor networks have several applications in different areas like medical, military, industry, safety, etc. Recently, Kumari and Om have discussed an authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks in coal mines for safety monitoring. In this paper, we cryptanalyze their scheme and find that it is vulnerable to the smart card loss attack, stolen verifier attack, and denial of service attack, besides other problems: (1) user traceability and (2) the sensor nodes are not anonymous. Here, we purpose an improved scheme by overcoming these limitations. We formally show the security analysis of our proposed scheme using random oracle and its security verification using the AVISPA tool. We carry out its informal analysis to show its resistivity to various known attacks. It requires less computational and storage costs, and is more secured than the related schemes. We also show its practical demonstration using NS2 simulator.