A novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks, based on the Internet of Things notion

The idea of the Internet of Things (IOT) notion is that everything within the global network is accessible and interconnected. As such Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) play a vital role in such an environment, since they cover a wide application field. Such interconnection can be seen from the aspect of a remote user who can access a single desired sensor node from the WSN without the necessity of firstly connecting with a gateway node (GWN). This paper focuses on such an environment and proposes a novel user authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme enables a remote user to securely negotiate a session key with a general sensor node, using a lightweight key agreement protocol. The proposed scheme ensures mutual authentication between the user, sensor node, and the gateway node (GWN), although the GWN is never contacted by the user. The proposed scheme has been adapted to the resource-constrained architecture of the WSN, thus it uses only simple hash and XOR computations. Our proposed scheme tackles these risks and the challenges posed by the IOT, by ensuring high security and performance features. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.