On the Design of Secure and Efficient Three-Factor Authentication Protocol Using Honey List for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The Internet of Thing (IoT) is useful for connecting and collecting variable data of objects through the Internet, which makes to generate useful data for humanity. An indispensable enabler of IoT is the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many environments, such as smart healthcare, smart transportation and smart grid, have adopted WSN. Nonetheless, WSNs remain vulnerable to variety of attacks because they send and receive data over public channels. Moreover, the performance of IoT enabled sensor devices has limitations since the sensors are lightweight devices and are resource constrained. To overcome these problems, many security authentication protocols for WSNs have been proposed. However, many researchers have pointed out that preventing smartcard stolen and off-line guessing attacks is an important security issue, and guessing identity and password at the same time is still possible. To address these weaknesses, this paper presents a secure and efficient authentication protocol based on three-factor authentication by taking advantage of biometrics. Meanwhile, the proposed protocol uses a honey_list technique to protect against brute force and stolen smartcard attacks. By using the honey_list technique and three factors, the proposed protocol can provide security even if two of the three factors are compromised. Considering the limited performance of the sensors, we propose an efficient protocol using only hash functions excluding the public key based elliptic curve cryptography. For security evaluation of the proposed authentication protocol, we perform informal security analysis, and Real-Or-Random (ROR) model-based and Burrows Abadi Needham (BAN) logic based formal security analysis. We also perform the formal verification using the widely-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation software. Besides, compared to previous researches, we demonstrate that our proposed authentication protocol for WSNs systems is more suitable and secure than others.