Cryptanalysis and Security Improvements of ‘Two-Factor User Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks’

By Muhammad Khurram Khan, Khaled S. Alghathbar. Italian National Conference on Sensors, 2010

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

User authentication in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a critical security issue due to their unattended and hostile deployment in the field. Since sensor nodes are equipped with limited computing power, storage, and communication modules; authenticating remote users in such resource-constrained environments is a paramount security concern. Recently, M.L. Das proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in WSNs and claimed that his scheme is secure against different kinds of attack. However, in this paper, we show that the M.L. Das-scheme has some critical security pitfalls and cannot be recommended for real applications. We point out that in his scheme: users cannot change/update their passwords, it does not provide mutual authentication between gateway node and sensor node, and is vulnerable to gateway node bypassing attack and privileged-insider attack. To overcome the inherent security weaknesses of the M.L. Das-scheme, we propose improvements and security patches that attempt to fix the susceptibilities of his scheme. The proposed security improvements can be incorporated in the M.L. Das-scheme for achieving a more secure and robust two-factor user authentication in WSNs.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e91d0054ec5bdba609b2c34b45dde54f049c1eb7

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Citations in the corpus

A Secured Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Elliptic Curves Cryptography (2011, methodology): “In the Das scheme [14,15], U i performs registration with the GW-node by presenting a password in plain format.”
A temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks (2013, methodology): “The message send by each sensor node is 51-byte. compared with it, the messages send by each sensor node in Khan and Alghathbar (2010), Chen and Shih (2010), Xu et al. (2009) and Song (2010) separately 19-byte, 16-byte, 35-byte and 51-byte.”
A Robust ECC-Based Provable Secure Authentication Protocol With Privacy Preserving for Industrial Internet of Things (2018, background): “Later, some researchers [9], [10] pointed out that the protocol in [8] has some function and”
A Provably Secure, Efficient, and Flexible Authentication Scheme for Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Networks (2016, methodology): “[5] proposed a protocol as an improvement of Das’s, but Vaidya et al.”
A novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks, based on the Internet of Things notion (2014, background): “In 2010, Khan and Alghathbar [21] also presented an improvement of Das’s scheme.”