title: Efficient and anonymous two-factor user authentication in wireless sensor networks: achieving user anonymity with lightweight sensor computation.
abstract: A smart-card-based user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks (hereafter referred to as a SCA-WSN scheme) is designed to ensure that only users who possess both a smart card and the corresponding password are allowed to gain access to sensor data and their transmissions. Despite many research efforts in recent years, it remains a challenging task to design an efficient SCA-WSN scheme that achieves user anonymity. The majority of published SCA-WSN schemes use only lightweight cryptographic techniques (rather than public-key cryptographic techniques) for the sake of efficiency, and have been demonstrated to suffer from the inability to provide user anonymity. Some schemes employ elliptic curve cryptography for better security but require sensors with strict resource constraints to perform computationally expensive scalar-point multiplications; despite the increased computational requirements, these schemes do not provide user anonymity. In this paper, we present a new SCA-WSN scheme that not only achieves user anonymity but also is efficient in terms of the computation loads for sensors. Our scheme employs elliptic curve cryptography but restricts its use only to anonymous user-to-gateway authentication, thereby allowing sensors to perform only lightweight cryptographic operations. Our scheme also enjoys provable security in a formal model extended from the widely accepted Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway (2000) model to capture the user anonymity property and various SCA-WSN specific attacks (e.g., stolen smart card attacks, node capture attacks, privileged insider attacks, and stolen verifier attacks).
authors: Department of Computer Engineering, Konkuk University, Chungju, Chungcheongbukdo, Korea.
authors: Junghyun
authors: J
authors: Nam
authors: School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, South Australia, Australia.
authors: Kim-Kwang Raymond
authors: KK
authors: Choo
authors: Department of Computer Engineering, Konkuk University, Chungju, Chungcheongbukdo, Korea.
authors: Sangchul
authors: S
authors: Han
authors: Information Management Division, Korean Intellectual Property Office, Daejeon, Korea.
authors: Moonseong
authors: M
authors: Kim
authors: Department of Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggido, Korea.
authors: Juryon
authors: J
authors: Paik
authors: Department of Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Gyeonggido, Korea.
authors: Dongho
authors: D
authors: Won
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000295:instrumentation*; D016494:Computer Security / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003219:Confidentiality; D000069098:Health Smart Cards; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D059015:Wireless Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*