Cryptanalysis and Improvement of an ECC-Based Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The Internet of Things is the interconnection of devices that exchange collected data with each other through the internet using electronics, software, and sensors. Wireless sensor network is used extensively in implementation of the Internet of Things system. With the increasing use of them, many researchers have focused on the security in wireless sensor network environment. In 2016, Wu et al. proposed a user authentication protocol for wireless sensor network, claiming it was secure from various types of attacks. However, we found out that their scheme has some vulnerabilities to the user impersonation attack, and the denial of service attack. In order to overcome these problems, we review Wu et al.’s protocol and propose an improved protocol based on their protocol. Then, we show that our proposed protocol is more secure than other authentication protocols for wireless sensor network.