Simple, secure and dynamic protocol for mutual authentication of nodes in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are being used worldwide in many areas. As the application areas of the WSN are increasing at the same rate the security threats are also increasing. Intruders are applying various mechanisms to access the sensible and confidential data from sensors. Hence, strong security measures are much needed to immune WSNs from various attacks. Authentication is a security mechanism that protects WSNs from wide range of security attacks. In this paper, an authentication protocol is proposed to mutually authenticate sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol is based on tokens. Any node when deployed in WSN is embedded with base station's public key and through the corresponding cluster head; it requests and acquires its token for authentication from the base station. The generated token is light in weight and reduces much of computational, communicational and storage overheads. The proposed protocol is verified for its security both formally and automatically. The proposed protocol is proved to be secure by evaluation in BAN logic and found SAFE by AVISPA-a model checker tool for testing authentication protocol.