A temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) can be deployed in any unattended environment. With the new developed IoT (Internet of Things) technology, remote authorized users are allowed to access reliable sensor nodes to obtain data and even are allowed to send commands to the nodes in the WSN. Because of the resource constrained nature of sensor nodes, it is important to design a secure, effective and lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme. The gateway node (GWN) plays a crucial role in the WSN as all data transmitted to the outside network must pass through it. We propose a temporal-credential-based mutual authentication scheme among the user, GWN and the sensor node. With the help of the password-based authentication, GWN can issue a temporal credential to each user and sensor node. For a user, his/her temporal credential can be securely protected and stored openly in a smart card. For a sensor node, its temporal credential is related to its identity and must privately stored in its storage medium. Furthermore, with the help of GWN, a lightweight key agreement scheme is proposed to embed into our protocol. The protocol only needs hash and XOR computations. The results of security and performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides relatively more security features and high security level without increasing too much overhead of communication, computation and storage. It is realistic and well adapted for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks.