User Dispersed Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have constrained resources and are susceptible to various attacks. It is critical to design a secure and efficient user authentication protocol for WSNs. Considering that sensor nods have extraordinary number and asymmetric resources compared with the number of users waiting for authentication, we propose user dispersed authentication scheme based on two-tiered WSN. In the proposed scheme, relative-powerful master node confirms user identify firstly, sensor nodes then perform user authentication collaboratively. Our scheme can avoid forgery and replay attack effectively, and it still works well in spite of partial impaired sensor nods in WSN. Furthermore, sensor nodes save more energy for less computational load, and communication cost is thus deduced by decreasing information diffusion.