Cryptanalysis of an efficient biometric authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In 2013, Althobaiti et al. proposed an efficient biometricbased user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks. We analyze their scheme for the security against known attacks. Though their scheme is efficient in computation, in this paper we show that their scheme has some security pitfalls such as (1) it is not resilient against node capture attack, (2) it is insecure against impersonation attack, (3) it is insecure against man-in-the-middle attack, and (4) it is also insecure against privileged insider attack. Finally, we give some pointers for improving their scheme so that the designed scheme needs to be secure against various known attacks.