On the design of a secure user authentication and key agreement scheme for wireless sensor networks.

A wireless sensor network (WSN) typically consists of a large number of resource-constrained sensor nodes and several control or gateway nodes. Ensuring the security of the asymmetric nature of WSN is challenging, and designing secure and efficient user authentication and key agreement schemes for WSNs is an active research area. For example, in 2016, Farash et al. proposed a user authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs. However, we reveal previously unpublished vulnerabilities in their scheme, which allow an attacker to carry out sensor node spoofing, password guessing, user/sensor node anonymity, and user impersonation attacks. We then present a scheme, which does not suffer from the identified vulnerabilities. To demonstrate the practicality of the scheme, we evaluate the scheme using NS-2 simulator. We then prove the scheme secure using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]