Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have its applications in many domains such as agriculture, medicine, safety, and industry. Due to its wireless channel, it is vulnerable to many security threats. To provide end‐to‐end secure communication, various authentication and key agreement protocols have been discussed. Recently, Li et al have designed a mutual authentication and key agreement protocol for WSNs. However, it is found that this scheme does not resist to offline password guessing, device stolen, insider, and replay attacks besides user traceability problem. In this paper, a mutual authentication and key agreement protocol by overcoming the deficiencies of their scheme is proposed. Its formal security verification is shown using ProVerif tool. Its performance analysis is presented in terms of communication cost, computational cost, storage cost, and security features along with the other related schemes. It offers more security features than the other related schemes.

In this paper, we propose a new steganography technique using the snake scan ordering strategy. The proposed method hides the secret data that is an image in another image, known as the cover image. In this method, the pixel values of the secret image are organized in snake scan order, which are preprocessed to reduce their size. The resultant data is embedded into the Least Significant Bits (LSBs) of the pixels of the cover image. To minimize the error/distortion, the pixel values of the stegoimage are adjusted using Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (OPAP). The performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the simple LSB substitution method, Chang et al. method, Thein & Lin method, and Chen method in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). Our proposed method has higher PSNR in almost all cases

Summary Due to fast development of wireless technology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used in many applications such environmental monitoring, health monitoring, and area monitoring. To protect WSNs from various security threats, many user authentication protocols have been proposed. Recently, Gope and Hwang have discussed an authentication protocol for WSNs. Here, we show that their scheme is not resistant to stolen verifier, user impersonation, smart card loss, and insider attacks. Also, it does not maintain secrecy of session key and anonymity of sensor node. Then we devise an efficient user authentication protocol using physically unclonable function (PUF) for WSNs to overcome the limitations of their scheme. We present our protocol's informal security analysis to show that is resistant to various known attacks. Formal security verification and analysis of the proposed protocol are done using ProVerif tool and widely accepted Real‐Or‐Random (ROR) model, respectively. In the performance analysis, we show that our protocol offers more security features than the others related schemes.

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