A secure light weight scheme for user authentication and key agreement in multi-gateway based wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks can be deployed in any attended or unattended environments like environmental monitoring, agriculture, military, health care etc., where the sensor nodes forward the sensing data to the gateway node. As the sensor node has very limited battery power and cannot be recharged after deployment, it is very important to design a secure, effective and lightweight user authentication and key agreement protocol for accessing the sensed data through the gateway node over insecure networks. Most recently, Turkanovic et al. proposed a light weight user authentication and key agreement protocol for accessing the services of the WSNs environment and claimed that the same protocol is efficient in terms of security and complexities than related existing protocols. In this paper, we have demonstrated several security weaknesses of the Turkanovic et al. protocol. Additionally, we have also illustrated that the authentication phase of the Turkanovic et al. is not efficient in terms of security parameters. In order to fix the above mentioned security pitfalls, we have primarily designed a novel architecture for the WSNs environment and basing upon which a proposed scheme has been presented for user authentication and key agreement scheme. The security validation of the proposed protocol has done by using BAN logic, which ensures that the protocol achieves mutual authentication and session key agreement property securely between the entities involved. Moreover, the proposed scheme has simulated using well popular AVISPA security tool, whose simulation results show that the protocol is SAFE under OFMC and CL-AtSemodels. Besides, several security issues informally confirm that the proposed protocol is well protected in terms of relevant security attacks including the above mentioned security pitfalls. The proposed protocol not only resists the above mentioned security weaknesses, but also achieves complete security requirements including specially energy efficiency, user anonymity, mutual authentication and user-friendly password change phase. Performance comparison section ensures that the protocol is relatively efficient in terms of complexities. The security and performance analysis makes the system so efficient that the proposed protocol can be implemented in real-life application. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.