Advanced password based authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

This era of ubiquitous computing has led to the development of complex communication networks all over the world. Wireless sensors, due to their wide applicability, form a key component of any complex network. But, security is a major challenge in making wireless sensor networks robust. Many remote user authentication schemes have been proposed for authenticating the legitimate users of a wireless sensor network. Most of the recently proposed schemes are vulnerable to one or more security attacks and are inefficient in terms of processing time. In this paper, the scheme proposed by Xue et al. has been reviewed and it has been found that the scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attack, stolen smart card attack, server spoofing attack. This paper proposes a robust and efficient password based authentication scheme which is secure against all well known security attacks. Moreover, the scheme has a low computation and communication cost and does not suffer from time synchronization problem. A formal security analysis has been performed using AVISPA tool to prove the security of the protocol. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.