A security-enhanced mutual authentication scheme with privacy protected in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In recent years, the debate on user privacy is becoming increasingly fierce. As wireless sensor networks (e.g.: electronic medical system and smart home systems) increasingly penetrate people’s lives, it is imperative to design an identity authentication scheme with user privacy protection for wireless sensor networks. At present, many researchers have given their user authentication schemes by using different methods for user privacy protection. Two factor authentication scheme is now considered a relatively high safety performance. In this paper, we analyze the two factor authentication scheme proposed by Nam et al., and find that the scheme still has defects. The most fatal problem is that the scheme does not provide sufficient protection for privacy in wireless sensor networks. Based on the work of Nam, we are a complement to the defects of the existing scheme. A random number is inserted into the user registration phase to change the identity of the user into a disguised identity and assign ECC key pairs to each sensor node, thus enhancing the security of the node authentication data. In formal analysis, we use BAN logic as our analysis tool to prove that our scheme achieves mutual authentication. Furthermore, we also give informal analysis for almost known attacks, the result shows that our proposed scheme could provide better security features. Finally, we implemented our authentication scheme on the RF chip CC2538, and measured the related execution time parameters. In order to obtain more security features, the proposed scheme is slightly higher than other schemes in terms of time complexity.