Authentication Scheme For Wireless Sensor Networks Research Articles

A Data Integrity Authentication Scheme in WSNs Based on Double Watermark

Aiming at data security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a data authentication scheme based on double watermark is proposed in this paper. Double watermark includes reversible watermark and irreversible watermark. The former generated by group head data is embedded into the effective precision bit of data, and the latter generated by the effective precision bit of the data themselves and a defined array is embedded into the flag bit in two cases. Two adjacent groups form a working group. For the first case, a flag-check matrix is constructed by the special data set which includes the head of the current group and the tail of the previous group, and the data around them. Through the matrix, the watermark is embedded into the special data set to ensure the robustness of grouping. For the second case, watermark is embedded into the group data except special data set (the rest data) to ensure efficient detection of attacks. When the attacked position and type are detected, the data that are not tampered with in this group can still recover the effective precision bit. The security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the comprehensive performance of the proposed scheme outperforms that of those state-of-the-art schemes.

Security Considerations on Three-Factor Anonymous Authentication Scheme for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used to monitor various environmental conditions including movement, pollution level, temperature, humidity, and etc. Secure authentication is very important for the success of WSNs. Li et al. proposed a three-factor anonymous authentication scheme in WSNs over Internet of things (IoT). They argued that their authentication scheme achieves more security and functional features, which are required for WSNs over IoT. Especially, they insisted that their user authentication scheme provides security against sensor node impersonation attack, and resists session-specific temporary information attack and various other attacks. However, this paper shows some security weaknesses in Li et al.’s scheme, especially focused on sensor node masquerading attack, known session-specific temporary information attack and deficiency of perfect forward secrecy. Especially, security considerations are very important to the modern IoT based applications. Thereby, the result of this paper could be very helpful for the IoT security researches.

SLUA-WSN: Secure and Lightweight Three-Factor-Based User Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are composed of multiple sensor nodes with limited storage, computation, power, and communication capabilities and are widely used in various fields such as banks, hospitals, institutes to national defense, research, and so on. However, useful services are susceptible to security threats because sensitive data in various fields are exchanged via a public channel. Thus, secure authentication protocols are indispensable to provide various services in WSN. In 2019, Mo and Chen presented a lightweight secure user authentication scheme in WSN. We discover that Mo and Chen’s scheme suffers from various security flaws, such as session key exposure and masquerade attacks, and does not provide anonymity, untraceability, and mutual authentication. To resolve the security weaknesses of Mo and Chen’s scheme, we propose a secure and lightweight three-factor-based user authentication protocol for WSN, called SLUA-WSN. The proposed SLUA-WSN can prevent security threats and ensure anonymity, untraceability, and mutual authentication. We analyze the security of SLUA-WSN through the informal and formal analysis, including Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulation. Moreover, we compare the performance of SLUA-WSN with some existing schemes. The proposed SLUA-WSN better ensures the security and efficiency than previous proposed scheme and is suitable for practical WSN applications.

A secure three-factor authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks using ECC

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small and low powered devices called as sensor nodes. They have been used in many areas like military, safety, health, agriculture, etc. One of the challenging issues in them is to provide the secure communication as the channels used are wireless. User authentication is a mechanism which is used to provide the secure communication in them. Here, we propose a three-factor authentication scheme for WSNs using ECC. We simulate it using the ProVerif tool for its formal security verification. We also discuss its informal security analysis to show that it is resistant to various known attacks. We evaluate the performance of our scheme in terms of security features, computational cost, communication cost and storage cost along with that of the existing related schemes. We show that it is more secured than the others schemes and has less communication cost.

On the design of secure user authenticated key management scheme for multigateway‐based wireless sensor networks using ECC

SummaryIn wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there are many critical applications (for example, healthcare, vehicle tracking, and battlefield), where the online streaming data generated from different sensor nodes need to be analyzed with respect to quick control decisions. However, as the data generated by these sensor nodes usually flow through open channel, so there are higher chances of various types of attacks either on the nodes or on to the data captured by these nodes. In this paper, we aim to design a new elliptic curve cryptography–based user authenticated key agreement protocol in a hierarchical WSN so that a legal user can only access the streaming data from generated from different sensor nodes. The proposed scheme is based upon 3‐factor authentication, as it applies smart card, password, and personal biometrics of a user (for ticket generation). The proposed scheme maintains low computation cost for resource‐constrained sensor nodes, as it uses efficient 1‐way cryptographic hash function and bitwise exclusive‐OR operations for secure key establishment between different sensor nodes. The security analysis using the broadly accepted Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic, formal security verification using the popular simulation tool (automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications), and informal security show that the proposed scheme is resilient against several well‐known attacks needed for a user authentication scheme in WSNs. The comparison of security and functionality requirements, communication and computation costs of the proposed scheme, and other related existing user authentication schemes shows the superior performance of the proposed scheme.

Lightweight and anonymous three-factor authentication and access control scheme for real-time applications in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play an important role and support a variety of real time applications, such as healthcare monitoring, military surveillance, vehicular tracking and, so on. Secure and real time information accessing from the sensor nodes in these applications is very important. Because wireless sensor nodes are limited in computing and communication capabilities and data storage, it is very crucial to design an effective and secure lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme. Recently, Gope et al. proposed a realistic lightweight anonymous authentication scheme in WSNs and claimed that their scheme satisfied all security concerns in these networks. However, we show that in their scheme the adversary can obtain the session key between the user and the sensor node. In order to fix this drawback, we propose an improved three-factor authentication scheme which is more suitable than Gope et al.’s scheme and also provides more desired security properties such as three-factor authentication and access control. Through the informal analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attack found in Gope et al.’s scheme. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the validity of our proposed scheme using the BAN logic. As compared with the previous authentication schemes, the proposed scheme is not only more secure but also enough practical and competitive with existing schemes.

A Temporal Credential-Based Mutual Authentication with Multiple-Password Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which consist of a large number of sensor nodes, have become among the most important technologies in numerous fields, such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, control systems in nuclear reactors, vehicle safety systems, and medical monitoring. The most serious drawback for the widespread application of WSNs is the lack of security. Given the resource limitation of WSNs, traditional security schemes are unsuitable. Approaches toward withstanding related attacks with small overhead have thus recently been studied by many researchers. Numerous studies have focused on the authentication scheme for WSNs, but most of these works cannot achieve the security performance and overhead perfectly. Nam et al. proposed a two-factor authentication scheme with lightweight sensor computation for WSNs. In this paper, we review this scheme, emphasize its drawbacks, and propose a temporal credential-based mutual authentication with a multiple-password scheme for WSNs. Our scheme uses multiple passwords to achieve three-factor security performance and generate a session key between user and sensor nodes. The security analysis phase shows that our scheme can withstand related attacks, including a lost password threat, and the comparison phase shows that our scheme involves a relatively small overhead. In the comparison of the overhead phase, the result indicates that more than 95% of the overhead is composed of communication and not computation overhead. Therefore, the result motivates us to pay further attention to communication overhead than computation overhead in future research.

Secure biometric-based authentication scheme with smart card revocation/reissue for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ad-hoc networks composed primarily of a large number of sensor nodes with limited power, computation, storage and communication capabilities. The issue of securing and authenticating communications in such a network is problematic, and thus an adversary has an opportunity to capture a sensor node directly from the target field and extract all the information from its memory. In 2013, Yoon and Kim proposed an advanced biometric-based user authentication scheme for WSNs. Choi et al. analyzed Yoon and Kim’s scheme and performed a security cryptanalysis in 2016. They demonstrated that Yoon and Kim’s scheme had several security problems, and proposed instead an improved biometric-based user authentication scheme using fuzzy extraction. However, we cryptanalyze Choi et al.’s scheme and demonstrate that their scheme is vulnerable to insider attack and has a problem with smart card revocation/reissue. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a secure biometric-based authentication scheme in WSNs that is secure against inside adversaries and provides secure and efficient smart card revocation/reissue.

A Strong Authentication Scheme with User Privacy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for many real-time applications. User authentication is an important security service for WSNs to ensure only legitimate users can access the sensor data within the network. In 2012, Yoo and others proposed a security-performance-balanced user authentication scheme for WSNs, which is an enhancement of existing schemes. In this paper, we show that Yoo and others' scheme has security flaws, and it is not efficient for real WSNs. In addition, this paper proposes a new strong authentication scheme with user privacy for WSNs. The proposed scheme not only achieves end-party mutual authentication (that is, between the user and the sensor node) but also establishes a dynamic session key. The proposed scheme preserves the security features of Yoo and others' scheme and other existing schemes and provides more practical security services. Additionally, the efficiency of the proposed scheme is more appropriate for real-world WSNs applications.

An enhanced two-factor user authentication in wireless sensor networks

Since wireless sensor networks (WSN) are often deployed in an unattended environment and sensor nodes are equipped with limited computing power modules, user authentication is a critical issue when a user wants to access data from sensor nodes. Recently, M.L. Das proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in WSN and claimed that his scheme is secure against different kinds of attack. Later, Khan and Alghathbar (K-A) pointed out that Das' scheme has some security pitfalls and showed several improvements to overcome these weaknesses. However, we demonstrate that in the K-A-scheme, there is no provision of non-repudiation, it is susceptible to the attack due to a lost smart card, and mutual authentication between the user and the GW-node does not attained. Moreover, the GW-node cannot prove that the first message comes from the user. To overcome these security weaknesses of the K-A-scheme, we propose security patches and prove our scheme.

Cryptanalysis and Security Improvements of ‘Two-Factor User Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks’

User authentication in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a critical security issue due to their unattended and hostile deployment in the field. Since sensor nodes are equipped with limited computing power, storage, and communication modules; authenticating remote users in such resource-constrained environments is a paramount security concern. Recently, M.L. Das proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in WSNs and claimed that his scheme is secure against different kinds of attack. However, in this paper, we show that the M.L. Das-scheme has some critical security pitfalls and cannot be recommended for real applications. 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. To overcome the inherent security weaknesses of the M.L. Das-scheme, we propose improvements and security patches that attempt to fix the susceptibilities of his scheme. The proposed security improvements can be incorporated in the M.L. Das-scheme for achieving a more secure and robust two-factor user authentication in WSNs.