Provably secure user authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In recent years, user authentication has emerged as an interesting field of research in wireless sensor networks. Most recently, in 2016, Chang and Le presented a scheme to authenticate the users in wireless sensor network using a password and smart card. They proposed two protocols scriptP1 and scriptP2. scriptP1 is based on exclusive or (XOR) and hash functions, while scriptP2 deploys elliptic curve cryptography in addition to the two functions used in scriptP1. Although their protocols are efficient, we point out that both scriptP1 and scriptP2 are vulnerable to session specific temporary information attack and offline password guessing attack, while scriptP1 is also vulnerable to session key breach attack. In addition, we show that both the protocols scriptP1 and scriptP2 are inefficient in authentication and password change phases. To withstand these weaknesses found in their protocols, we aim to design a new authentication and key agreement scheme using elliptic curve cryptography. Rigorous formal security proofs using the broadly accepted, the random oracle models, and the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic and verification using the well‐known Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool are preformed on our scheme. The analysis shows that our designed scheme has the ability to resist a number of known attacks comprising those found in both Chang–Le's protocols. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

“…The protocol [81] uses the BAN-logic to prove that the protocol can resist numerous security attacks, which include the attacks, found in the Amin and Biswas's scheme [73]. There are seven authentication protocols [154,73,75,78,81,158,223] that use the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Application (AVISPA) security analyzer [220]. The AVISPA tool provides a modular and expressive formal language for specifying security protocols and properties.…”

A Privacy Protection User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme Tailored for the Internet of Things Environment: PriAuth

“…From the table, it can be inferred that privacy is a problem that has not drawn enough attention from the researchers. In some schemes, [5] √ × √ Jung et al [6] √ × × Fan et al [7] × × × Amin and Biswas [8] × × × Nam et al [9] × × √ Lu et al [10] √ √ × Zhao et al [11] √ × × Hou et al [12] × × × Farash et al [13] × × × Turkanović et al [14] × × × PriAuth √ √ √ all the users share the same key to encrypt their identities, this means the encrypted identity could be decrypted by a malicious or curious user using the same key [5,6,10,13]. Some of the schemes fail to enable the anonymity of the user or sensor, such as [37][38][39].…”

“…Thus, only the gateway could learn the identities. As for the shared key between user and sensor, in some schemes, the gateway knows the shared key in schemes [6][7][8][11][12][13][14], while, in some others, the gateway does not know the key, they use Diffie-Hellman (DH) anonymous key agreement protocol to build the shared key [1,2,4,5,9,30]. As we have discussed, the gateway is not allowed to know the shared key in order to prevent a curious gateway from eavesdropping the sensor data.…”

“…Traceability means the adversary can track a user or a sensor according to their identities or masked identities like in the scheme [5,10,[29][30][31][32]. Once some fixed information about the identities is used in a scheme, then this scheme could probably be tracked by an adversary.…”

“…computational costs of different operations, and the operations' execution time is measured by simulation [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. The execution time of XOR operation is very small compared to an elliptic curve point multiplication or hash operation; we neglect it when computing the time approximately [3].…”