Improving Security of Lightweight Authentication Technique for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

One of the great application of user authentication and key agreement protocol is to access sensor information securely over the insecure networks. Recently, Kalra and Sood proposed an efficient smart card based authentication protocol to exchange confidential information securely between the user and sensor node. We review the security of Kalra and Sood scheme and observe that their scheme is vulnerable to stolen smart card attack, stolen verifier attack and impersonation attack. The entire analysis indicates that there is a need of secure and user-friendly authentication mechanism for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). To ensure secure communication in WSNs, we improve the security of the authentication mechanism for WSNs. The main intention of this paper is to confiscate the mentioned security attacks by proposing an efficient authentication protocol using smart card. To validate security attributes, we have used well-popular AVISPA simulation tool whose results shows that the proposed protocol is SAFE under OFMC and CL-AtSe models. Further, the performance analysis shows its efficiency.