A Dynamic User Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Currently, wireless sensor networks are a novel technology industry with various applications. The nodes deployed in such an environment are uncontrolled by anyone. Therefore, any security flaws can threaten future applications. Consequently, user authentication is an important issue for wireless sensor networks because it allows only authorized users to access real-time data from the sensor nodes or cluster heads via a base station. In addition, due to the cost-constrained factor of nodes, performance also is a crucial issue that must be considered. Thus, in this paper, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks using smart cards. In addition, we use dynamic identities to prevent threats to users' privacy. Analyses of the security and performance of our scheme demonstrated that it can achieve mutual authentication and key agreement among users, a base station, and cluster heads; resist most potential attacks; and provide higher efficiency than previous schemes. Therefore, our proposed scheme is more suitable applications involving wireless sensor networks.