Efficient Multi-Factor User Authentication Protocol with Forward Secrecy for Real-Time Data Access in WSNs

Abstract

It is challenging to design a secure and efficient multi-factor authentication scheme for real-time data access in wireless sensor networks. On the one hand, such real-time applications are generally security critical, and various security goals need to be met. On the other hand, sensor nodes and users' mobile devices are typically of a resource-constrained nature, and expensive cryptographic primitives cannot be used. In this work, we first revisit four foremost multi-factor authentication schemes (i.e., those of Amin et al. (JNCA'18), Srinivas et al. (IEEE TDSC'18), Li et al. (JNCA'18), and Li et al. (IEEE TII'18)) and use them as case studies to reveal the difficulties and challenges in designing a multi-factor authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks correctly. We identify the root causes for their failures in achieving truly multi-factor security and forward secrecy. We further propose a robust multi-factor authentication scheme that makes use of the imbalanced computational nature of the RSA cryptosystem, particularly suitable for scenarios where sensor nodes (but not the user's device) are the main energy bottleneck. Comparison results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme. As far as we know, it is the first two-factor authentication scheme for real-time data access in WSNs that can satisfy all 12 criteria of the state-of-the-art evaluation metric under the harshest adversary model so far.