Security Analysis of ‘Two–Factor User Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks’

Abstract

Authenticating remote users in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an important security issue due to their un-attended and hostile deployments. Usually, sensor nodes are equipped with limited computing power, storage, and communication module, thus authenticating remote users in such resource-constrained environment is a critical security concern. Recently, M.L Das proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in WSN and claimed that his scheme is secure against different kind of attacks. However, in this paper, we prove that M.L Das-scheme has some critical security pitfalls and is not recommended for real application. We point out that in his scheme: users cannot change/update their passwords, it does not provide mutual authentication between gateway node and sensor node, and is vulnerable to gateway node bypassing attack and privileged-insider attack.KeywordsSensor NodeWireless Sensor NetworkSmart CardUser AuthenticationAuthentication SchemeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.