A Light and Anonymous Three-Factor Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in a variety of fields, and make people’s lives more convenient and efficient. However, WSNs are usually deployed in a harsh and insecure environment. Furthermore, sensors with limited hardware resources have a low capacity for data processing and communication. For these reasons, research on efficient and secure real-time authentication and key agreement protocols based on the characteristics of WSNs has gradually attracted the attention of academics. Although many schemes have been proposed, most of them cannot achieve all known security features with satisfactory performance, among which anonymity, N-Factor security, and forward secrecy are the most vulnerable. In order to solve these shortcomings, we propose a new lightweight and anonymous three-factor authentication scheme based on symmetric cryptographic primitives for WSNs. By using the automated security verification tool ProVerif, BAN-logic verification, and an informal security analysis, we prove that our proposed scheme is secure and realizes all known security features in WSNs. Moreover, we show that our proposed scheme is practical and efficient through the comparison of security features and performance.