User-Authentication Protocol to Secure Wireless Sensor Network Access in the Internet of Things Context

Abstract

Recently, the numerous academic papers have been published on Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) schemes for securing wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). The goal of these schemes is to protect external users’ access to data collected by WSNs. Due to limited resources and the wireless communication medium, the sensor nodes are vulnerable to multiple attacks performed by malicious user’s. Unfortunately, most of the proposed schemes are insecure and require higher storage, communication and computing costs. This paper presents a User Authentication protocol to secure WSNs Access in the IoT context (UAWSNA-IoT). The BAN-Logic and Real-Or-Random (ROR) models are used to demonstrate the reliability of UAWSNA-IoT in meeting all requirements for mutual authentication and session key security, respectively. In addition, UAWSNA-IoT offers high security with low computational, storage and communication overhead, making it an ideal choice for resource-constrained IoT devices such as WSNs.