Analysis and Improvement of Authentication Schemes for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks with Fog Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing enables access to needed resources from a shared pool of configurable computing resources anytime, anywhere. Cloud computing offers many benefits, such as security and reliability of data and convenience of resource sharing. But as more and more devices are accessed, the demand for network bandwidth increases and it is because cloud computing centralizes all the resources that risks are also centralized. To overcome the shortcomings of cloud computing, the concept of fog computing has been introduced. Fog computing supports high mobility and has a wide geographical distribution, it also delivers data with very low latency. However, as an extension of cloud computing, fog computing inherits the security and privacy issues of cloud computing. Therefore, identity authentication in a fog computing environment is essential. In 2022, Sahoo et al. proposed an authentication scheme for industrial wireless sensor networks with fog computing. However, we analyze the security of Sahoo et al.’s scheme and find that many places in the data distribution phase are not clearly explained and their scheme is also not resistant to user impersonation attack, tracking attack, denial of service attack and replay attack. In order to overcome the weaknesses of Sahoo et al.’s scheme, this paper proposes an improved scheme by making full use of random numbers and timestamps. After security analysis and comparison with some similar schemes, it is shown that the improved scheme can resist various known attacks and has smaller computational cost.