Cryptanalysis and improvement of ECC – based security enhanced user authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

User authentication and secret session key exchange between a user and a sensor node are important security requirements of wireless sensor networks for retrieving the important, confidential and real time information from the sensor nodes. In 2014, Choi et al. proposed a elliptic curve cryptography based user authentication protocol with enhanced security for wireless sensor networks and after security analysis of their protocol we find that their protocol has some security drawbacks such as (1) no resilient against node capture attack, (2) insecure against stolen smart card attack (3) vulnerable to sensor node energy exhausting attacks. Based on the security analysis we propose a scheme to withstand the various security weaknesses of WSNs. Furthermore, the comparative security and computational performance analysis indicate that our proposed scheme is relatively more secure and efficient.