Analysis and Improvement of a Robust User Authentication Framework for Ubiquitous Sensor Networks

Abstract

As an infrastructure of the ubiquitous sensor networks, the wireless sensor network plays an important role in generation of multinetworks integrated system. And currently the wireless sensor network is not only being used to monitor and analyze information about the environment but also being used for more dynamic systems. The security system is one of standards for measuring whether a wireless sensor networks is an outstanding wireless sensor network. RUASN proposes a robust user authentication framework for wireless sensor networks, based on a two-factor concept. This proposed scheme possessed many advantages against major existing attacks and performed well at efficiency and low consumption. However, we have identified that the resistance of collusion attacks is weak. After analyzing, we proved that we can obtain the session key via controlling a compromised sensor node and using the collusion attack when a user wants to establish a session with a legal node. Therefore, to enhance the resistance of collusion attacks, we present two ways to solve the security drawbacks of RUASN scheme. One is to add a slight improvement into the RUASN scheme to enhance this scheme. Another is using the Hardware Security Module. After a simple analysis, we have proved that the improved scheme can resist the collusion attack.

Efficient and Anonymous Two-Factor User Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks: Achieving User Anonymity with Lightweight Sensor Computation

“…Since the early work of Das [2], He et al [3], Khan and Alghathbar [4] and Chen and Shih [5], all of which provide no keyexchange functionality, the design of SCA-WSN schemes has attracted much attention from researchers due to their potential to be widely deployed, and a number of proposals offering various levels of security and efficiency have been presented [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Some schemes consider only authenticated key exchange [6,8,9,12,20] while others attempt to additionally provide user anonymity [7,10,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Schemes such as the ones in [6,12,20] employ elliptic curve cryptography to provide perfect forward secrecy while most schemes [7][8][9][10][11][13][14][15][16]…”

“…Some schemes consider only authenticated key exchange [6,8,9,12,20] while others attempt to additionally provide user anonymity [7,10,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Schemes such as the ones in [6,12,20] employ elliptic curve cryptography to provide perfect forward secrecy while most schemes [7][8][9][10][11][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] use only lightweight cryptographic techniques, such as symmetric encryptions, message authentication codes and hash functions, to focus on improving the efficiency.…”

“…A smart-card-based user authentication scheme for WSNs (in short, a SCA-WSN scheme) allows a user holding its smart card issued by the gateway to achieve authenticated key exchange with a sensor, preferably in a way that its anonymity is preserved. Since the early work of Das [2], He et al [3], Khan and Alghathbar [4] and Chen and Shih [5], all of which provide no keyexchange functionality, the design of SCA-WSN schemes has attracted much attention from researchers due to their potential to be widely deployed, and a number of proposals offering various levels of security and efficiency have been presented [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Some schemes consider only authenticated key exchange [6,8,9,12,20] while others attempt to additionally provide user anonymity [7,10,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

A Provably-Secure ECC-Based Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Since then, the design of SUA-WSN schemes has received significant attention from researchers due to their potential to be widely deployed, and a number of solutions offering various levels of efficiency and security have been subsequently proposed [ 2 , 3 , 13 – 27 ]. Early schemes only aimed to achieve mutual authentication [ 13 – 15 ], while later schemes attempted to provide additional security properties, such as authenticated key exchange [ 2 , 3 , 16 – 27 ] and user anonymity [ 2 , 3 , 20 , 22 – 24 , 26 ]. Some schemes [ 16 , 21 , 27 ] employ elliptic curve cryptography to provide perfect forward secrecy, while others [ 2 , 3 , 12 – 14 , 17 – 20 , 22 – 26 ] only use symmetric cryptography and hash functions to focus on improving the efficiency.…”

“…Despite the research efforts over the recent years, it remains a significant challenge to design a robust SUA-WSN scheme that carries a formal proof of security in a widely-accepted model. As summarized in Table 1 , most of the published schemes either provide no formal analysis of security [ 3 , 12 – 14 , 16 , 20 – 22 , 24 – 26 ] or fail to achieve important security properties, such as mutual authentication, session-key security, user anonymity, two-factor security and resistance against various attacks [ 3 , 13 – 16 , 19 , 21 – 27 , 30 , 31 ]. Some schemes [ 2 , 17 – 19 , 23 , 27 ] have been proven secure using a computer security approach, which, as mentioned above, suffers from intractability and undecidability and could possibly give a false positive result.…”