An Enhanced Two-factor User Authentication Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

TLDR

Wireless sensor networks face security threats and resource constraints, making user authentication challenging, and many schemes have been proposed. The paper proposes an enhanced two‑factor user authentication protocol. The scheme uses only hash functions and requires three message exchanges for authentication. The authors identify weaknesses in existing schemes and show that their protocol is more secure and efficient through security and performance analyses.

Abstract

Designing a user authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks is a difficult task because wireless networks are susceptible to attacks and sensor node has limited energy, processing and storage resources. Recently, several authentication schemes have been proposed. This short paper shows some security problems and design weaknesses in those schemes. Furthermore, an enhanced two-factor user authentication protocol is presented. The proposed scheme only uses hash function, and a successful user authentication just requires three message exchanges. Security and performance analyses demonstrate that compared to the well-known authentication schemes, our proposal is more secure and efficient.