Title: Security enhanced user authentication scheme for wireless sensor network

Authors: Hoda Jannati; Abolfazl Falahati

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering (DCCS Lab), Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran. ' Department of Electrical Engineering (DCCS Lab), Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Authentication and privacy are the two imperative security requirements by every wireless networks. Only recently, Vaidya, Rodrigues and Park proposed two low-cost authentication schemes with user privacy for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, this paper shows Vaidya et al.'s schemes cannot provide privacy in the presence of an adversary as they claim. Also, Vaidya et al.'s schemes are vulnerable to offline password guessing attack. To overcome these weaknesses, this paper improves their profound authentication schemes. The security of the improved scheme is analysed which reveals that the improved scheme can overcome such weaknesses. The performance of the improved scheme is the same as Vaidya et al.'s schemes with the same simplicity as well as being still suitable for WSNs.

Keywords: authentication; denial of service attacks; man in the middle attacks; WSNs; wireless sensor networks; network security; wireless networks; privacy protection; privacy preservation; offline password guessing attacks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2012.049735

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2012 Vol.4 No.4, pp.215 - 228

Received: 06 Apr 2011
Accepted: 31 Oct 2011
Published online: 19 Nov 2014 *

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