Improved user authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

The primary requirements of a successful Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) security architecture are confidentiality, integrity and authentication. User authentication is essential for customized services and privileged access control in wireless sensor network. These sensors will have limited processing power, storage, bandwidth and limited communication capabilities. Two-factor user authentication concept is a most widely used technique in WSN. Exiting technique takes more energy consumption and shortening the sensor node lifetime. In this paper, we present a two-factor user authentication protocol for WSN, which provides strong authentication, session key establishment. This scheme is well-designed for sensor nodes which typically have limited resources in the sense that its authentication procedure requires no public key operations but it uses only one-way hash functions and smart cards and can be implemented efficiently. Our scheme allows the users to choose and change their passwords freely, and do not maintain any verifier table. We compare our proposal with other exiting technique through simulation and we show that it achieves high efficiency.