Security Enhanced User Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Elliptic Curves Cryptography

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of sensors, gateways and users. Sensors are widely distributed to monitor various conditions, such as temperature, sound, speed and pressure but they have limited computational ability and energy. To reduce the resource use of sensors and enhance the security of WSNs, various user authentication protocols have been proposed. In 2011, Yeh et al. first proposed a user authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for WSNs. However, it turned out that Yeh et al.'s protocol does not provide mutual authentication, perfect forward secrecy, and key agreement between the user and sensor. Later in 2013, Shi et al. proposed a new user authentication protocol that improves both security and efficiency of Yeh et al.'s protocol. However, Shi et al.'s improvement introduces other security weaknesses. In this paper, we show that Shi et al.'s improved protocol is vulnerable to session key attack, stolen smart card attack, and sensor energy exhausting attack. In addition, we propose a new, security-enhanced user authentication protocol using ECC for WSNs.

An Enhanced Secure Anonymity User Authentication Protocol for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The second method takes advantage of asymmetric cryptographic algorithm, which has the challenge of reducing computation load as much as possible. However, the latest protocols with this method neglect the possibility of improvement [6][7][8]. …”

“…The first one is the weakness or none of user anonymity [3,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14], which would cause being tracked easily. The second one is information leakage of the lost smart card [3,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14], which causes the attacker can do guesswork in a smaller space after extracting the information in the smart card. The third one is security recovery when system secret information is revealed [3, 5 -12], in which case, the system cannot update secret information conveniently because all users must register again.…”

“…From the top, the HWSN is divided into three layers, the gateway, the cluster head and the sensor nodes. Some protocols have been suggested on the security of HWSN [3,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14], in which several problems exist in the user authentication. After investigating the main technology of authentication, an enhanced secure anonymity user authentication protocol will be proposed by combing three factors of smart card, user password, and user biometrics in this paper.…”

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

“…In scheme [1], when a user asks to access a sensor's data, he could send his request 1 = {ID , ID , , , , } to the sensor.…”

“…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.…”