Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are of prominent use in unmanned surveillance applications. This peculiar trait of WSNs is actually the underlying technology of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart homes, smart cities, smart shopping complexes, smart traffic, smart health, and much more. Over time, WSNs have evolved as a strong base for laying the foundations of IoT infrastructure. In order to address the scenario in which a user wants to access the real-time data directly from the sensor node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Das recently proposed an anonymity-preserving three-factor authentication protocol. Das's protocol is suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes as building blocks. Das's protocol is claimed to be secure against different known attacks by providing formal security proof and security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. However, we find that Das's protocol has the following security loopholes: (1) By using a captured sensor node, an adversary can impersonate a legal user to the gateway node, impersonate other sensor nodes to deceive the user, and the adversary can also decrypt all the cipher-texts of the user; (2) the gateway node has a heavy computational cost due to user anonymity and thus the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. We overcome the shortcomings of Das's protocol and propose an improved protocol. We also prove the security of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. Compared with the other related protocols, the improved protocol enjoys better functionality without much enhancement in the computation and communication costs. Consequently, it is more suitable for applications in WSNs.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are of prominent use in unmanned surveillance applications. This peculiar trait of WSNs is actually the underlying technology of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) such as smart homes, smart cities, smart shopping complexes, smart traffic, smart health, and much more. Over time, WSNs have evolved as a strong base for laying the foundations of IoT infrastructure. In order to address the scenario in which a user wants to access the real-time data directly from the sensor node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Das recently proposed an anonymity-preserving three-factor authentication protocol. Das's protocol is suitable for resource-constrained sensor nodes because it only uses lightweight cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes as building blocks. Das's protocol is claimed to be secure against different known attacks by providing formal security proof and security verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool. However, we find that Das's protocol has the following security loopholes: (1) By using a captured sensor node, an adversary can impersonate a legal user to the gateway node, impersonate other sensor nodes to deceive the user, and the adversary can also decrypt all the cipher-texts of the user; (2) the gateway node has a heavy computational cost due to user anonymity and thus the protocol is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks. We overcome the shortcomings of Das's protocol and propose an improved protocol. We also prove the security of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model. Compared with the other related protocols, the improved protocol enjoys better functionality without much enhancement in the computation and communication costs. Consequently, it is more suitable for applications in WSNs.
In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been extensively used in many fields, which provide great convenience for people’s daily work and life. With the popularity of WSNs, people’s demands for related authentication protocols are developing in a comprehensive and perfect direction, and relevant designs are focusing more on two aspects: security and performance. However, current research cannot avoid the problem that security and efficiency are not compatible. Some studies use time-consuming cryptographic structures for security, while most lightweight schemes are designed without considering certain security properties, such as perfect forward secrecy, the resistance to known session-specific temporary information attack, etc. In our view, this conflict can be resolved by using lightweight cryptography primitives with special attention to protocol vulnerabilities and ever-evolving security requirements of people. By abandoning all unnecessary cryptographic structures, we propose a comprehensive lightweight three-factor authentication protocol with various security requirements, including adaptive privacy preservation, which is suitable for the user-friendly scenario in the WSN. Through security analysis, real-or-random (ROR) model proof, Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications experimental verification, and security aspect comparison, it is proved that our protocol is superior in the security aspect. The performance experiment under MIRACL library shows that this study has advantages in performance compared with other recent research.
The emerging growth of Internet-of-Things(IoT) technology, enable the adoption of many industrial applications. As an infrastructure point of view, Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN) attains utmost importance in industrial IoT. The security threats always remain serious issues for WSN. Recently, Li et al scheme presented a three-factor authentication scheme for IoT environments. This article reviews Li et al. protocol find out that their protocol is vulnerable to stolen-verifier-attacks, Anonymity and Traceability issues. We present, an improved authentication scheme to conquered the flaws in Li et al scheme. Furthermore, the proposed solution is formally verified with ProVerif. Moreover security inspection proves the robustness of the proposed protocol.
In the Internet of Things (IoT), numerous devices can interact with each other over the Internet. A wide range of IoT applications have already been deployed, such as transportation systems, healthcare systems, smart buildings, smart factories, and smart cities. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play crucial roles in these IoT applications. Researchers have published effective (but not entirely secure) approaches for merging WSNs into IoT environments. In IoT environments, the security effectiveness of remote user authentication is crucial for information transmission. Computational efficiency and energy consumption are crucial because the energy available to any WSN is limited. This paper proposes a notably efficient and secure authentication scheme based on temporal credential and dynamic ID for WSNs in IoT environments. The Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic method was used to validate our scheme. Cryptanalysis revealed that our scheme can overcome the security weaknesses of previously published schemes. The security functionalities and performance efficiency of our scheme are compared with those of previous related schemes. The result demonstrates that our scheme's security functionalities are quantitatively and qualitatively superior to those of comparable schemes. Our scheme can improve the effectiveness of authentication in IoT environments. Notably, our scheme has superior performance efficiency, low computational cost, frugal energy consumption, and low communication cost.
Because sensor nodes are deployed in public areas, these sensors are easy to capture by adversaries. Once a sensor is stolen, the sensitive information stored in it is likely to be exposed. Accordingly, designing a secure authentication protocol should consider this issue. Sadri et al. recently proposed a two-factor authentication protocol with anonymity for wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, we found that their protocol had a design flaw in the user and sensor authentication phase. Besides, their protocol can not resist stolen smart card attacks, sensor capture attacks, and user impersonation attacks. In addition, their protocol does not provide perfect forward security. This paper proposes a provably secure authentication to overcome these weaknesses and flaws. By comparing the security and performance of the proposed protocol with other related protocols, we find that our work has reasonable computation overhead and better security.
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has introduced a new dimension of connectivity, efficiency, and automation. However, it also presents significant security concerns, particularly in authentication. Strong and trustworthy authentication protocols are required to ensure secure communication and trustworthiness in IoT systems. For instance, Sahoo et al.’s authentication scheme has serious design flaws and lacks forward and backwards secrecy. Similarly, due to inherent design flaws, Mahmood et al.’s protocol is vulnerable to several major attacks. This paper presents a novel, lightweight authentication scheme for IoT-enabled WSNs to address these challenges. We prioritise low computational overhead, scalability, and strong security guarantees like perfect forward secrecy, backwards secrecy, and immunity against replay, MiTM, impersonation attacks, etc. We demonstrate through an extensive security analysis of the ROM model that our scheme addresses the shortcomings of existing methods. The protocol’s security is formally verified using the Scyther tool, and its practical feasibility is demonstrated through ESP32-based simulation on the wokwi platform, confirming correct cryptographic operations and session key management. This paper is a significant step toward designing an efficient and secure authentication system in line with the evolving requirements of modern IoT infrastructures.
The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) is turning common conceptions of the current Internet into a dream of smart objects that communicate with each other. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play an important role in such an environment, since they include a wide range of applications. Researchers are already working on how WSN can be effectively integrated into the IoT environment. One part of the integration is the security aspect. In recent years, Farash et al. proposed an efficient user authentication and key agreement scheme for Heterogeneous WSN (HWSN) tailored for the IoT environment. Although their scheme is efficient, we found that this scheme is vulnerable to several cryptographic attacks. This paper first demonstrates all security weaknesses of the Farash et al.'s scheme and then proposes a secure and improved mutual authentication and key agreement scheme.