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IEEE Systems Journal

A Lightweight and Secure Three-Factor Authentication Protocol With Adaptive Privacy-Preserving Property for Wireless Sensor Networks

Yi Li, Yuling Tian

Published Mar 10, 2022• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/jsyst.2022.3152561

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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.
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.
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.
A security protocol for wireless transmission is essential to defend sensitive information from malicious enemies by providing a variety of facilities such as privacy of the user's information, secure session key, associated authentication, and user-repeal facility when a person's authorizations are suddenly disclosed. Singh et al. proposed an improved user authentication and key agreement system for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Authors are sure that their protocol is secure from various attacks. Here, we find several security pitfalls in their scheme, such as an offline password-guessing attack, failure to protect the session key, and a man-in-the-middle attack. To remove the identified pitfalls found in Singh et al.'s scheme, we design an enhanced authentication scheme for WSNs tailored for IoT. We prove the reliability of our proposed protocol using the real or random (RoR) model. We also evaluate the proposed scheme with the associated schemes and show its superior efficacy as compared to its counterparts.
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.
Internet of Things (IoT) is an expanding technology that facilitate physical devices to inter-connect each other over a public channel. Moreover, the security of the next-generation wireless mobile communication technology, namely 5G with IoT, has been a field of much interest among researchers in the last several years. Previously, Sharif et al. had suggested an IoTbased lightweight three-party authentication scheme proclaiming a secured scheme against different threats. However, it was found that the scheme could not achieve user anonymity and guarantee session key security. Additionally, the scheme fails to provide proper authentication in the login phase, and it s unable to update a new password in the password change phase. Thus, we propose an improved three-factor-based data transmission authentication scheme (TDTAS) to address the weaknesses. The formal security analysis has been proved using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model. The informal security analysis demonstrates that the scheme is secure against several known attacks and achieves more security features. In addition, the comparison of the work with other related schemes demonstrates the proposed scheme has less communicational and storage costs.
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.