A lightweight user authentication scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

User authentication in classical networks is deeply addressed, but few results are related to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In addition, the proposed schemes do not provide mutual authentication or session-key agreement between the server and the user. Therefore, we present in this paper a lightweight user authentication scheme adapted to WSNs that provides mutual authentication and session-key agreement. The proposed scheme allows a user equipped with mobile device (typically PDA) to authenticate himself before gaining access to the WSN. The scheme is executed at two sides; the client side which controls the user´s mobile device and the server side represented by the coordinator of the WSN. A security analysis of the scheme is presented and it proves its resilience against classical types of attacks. The scheme is also implemented on real platform of sensor nodes. This implementation proves that our scheme is lightweight and rapid as it requires approximately only 1s to be fully executed. In addition, we have made a comparison between our scheme and the existing ones based on their security properties, and shown that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing ones in terms of confidentiality, integrity, mutual authentication and session key generation with a lightweight computation overhead.