An Efficient and Lightweight User Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks(WSNs) are susceptible to attacks and sensor nodes have limited resources, it is necessary to design a secure and lightweight user authentication protocol for WSNs. Over the past few years, a few user authentication schemes for WSNs were proposed, in which the concept of timestamps were employed without exception. Analysis shows that it brings new security flaws. An efficient and lightweight user authentication scheme for WSNs is proposed in this paper. In proposed scheme, we employ one-way hash function with a secret key. With the help of smart card, mutual authentication is performed using a challenge-response handshake between user and gateway node in both directions. and it avoids the problem of time synchronization between smart card and the gateway node. An analysis of the scheme is presented and it shows its resilience against classical types of attacks, and it adds less computational overhead than other schemes.