An improved two-factor mutual authentication scheme with key agreement in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As a main component of Internet of Things (IoTs), the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely applied to various areas, including environment monitoring, health monitoring of human body, farming, commercial manufacture, reconnaissance mission in military, and calamity alert etc. Meanwhile, the privacy concerns also arise when the users are required to get the real-time data from the sensor nodes directly. To solve this problem, several user authentication and key agreement schemes with a smart card and a password have been proposed in the past years. However, these schemes are vulnerable to some attacks such as offline password guessing attack, user impersonation attack by using attacker’s own smart card, sensor node impersonation attack and gateway node bypassing attack. In this paper, we propose an improved scheme which can resist a wide variety of attacks in WSNs. Cryptanalysis and performance analysis show that our scheme can solve the weaknesses of previously proposed schemes and enhance security requirements while maintaining low computational cost.