Lightweight and Physically Secure Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocol for Real-Time Data Access in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

TLDR

Industrial wireless sensor networks face energy, coverage, connectivity, and security constraints, with privacy a major challenge due to Internet connectivity and unattended deployment. The study aims to provide a lightweight, privacy‑preserving mutual authentication protocol enabling authorized users to access real‑time sensor data. The protocol employs physical‑layer security, a physically unclonable function, hash functions, and XOR operations to authenticate users with trusted devices. Analysis demonstrates that the protocol remains secure against node capture and delivers efficient performance for resource‑constrained IWSN devices.

Abstract

Industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) is an emerging class of a generalized WSN having constraints of energy consumption, coverage, connectivity, and security. However, security and privacy is one of the major challenges in IWSN as the nodes are connected to Internet and usually located in an unattended environment with minimum human interventions. In IWSN, there is a fundamental requirement for a user to access the real-time information directly from the designated sensor nodes. This task demands to have a user authentication protocol. To satisfy this requirement, this paper proposes a lightweight and privacy-preserving mutual user authentication protocol in which only the user with a trusted device has the right to access the IWSN. Therefore, in the proposed scheme, we considered the physical layer security of the sensor nodes. We show that the proposed scheme ensures security even if a sensor node is captured by an adversary. The proposed protocol uses the lightweight cryptographic primitives, such as one way cryptographic hash function, physically unclonable function, and bitwise exclusive operations. Security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure, and is efficient for the resource-constrained sensing devices in IWSN.