Journal Article

A Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Homes

Kwon, Taekyoung, Shin, Sooyeon

2019

Overview

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is used for a smart home system’s backbone that monitors home environment and controls smart home devices to manage lighting, heating, security and surveillance. However, despite its convenience and potential benefits, there are concerns about various security threats that may infringe on privacy and threaten our home life. For protecting WSNs for smart homes from those threats, authentication and key agreement are basic security requirements. There have been a large number of proposed authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs. In 2017, Jung et al. proposed an efficient and security enhanced anonymous authentication with key agreement scheme by employing biometrics information as the third authentication factor. They claimed that their scheme resists on various security attacks and satisfies basic security requirements. However, we have discovered that Jung et al.’s scheme possesses some security weaknesses. Their scheme cannot guarantee security of the secret key of gateway node and security of session key and protection against user tracking attack, information leakage attack, and user impersonation attack. In this paper, we describe how those security weaknesses occur and propose a lightweight three-factor authentication and key agreement scheme in WSNs for smart homes, as an improved version of Jung et al.’s scheme. We then present a detailed analysis of the security and performance of the proposed scheme and compare the analysis results with other related schemes.

• Publisher: MDPI AG,MDPI
• Subject: Agreements / anonymity / Automation / biometrics / Cryptography / Internet of Things / key agreement / password / Privacy / Sensors / smart card / Smart cards / smart home / Smart houses / three-factor authentication / untraceability / wireless sensor networks