A Secure and Improved Authentication Scheme for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks in the Internet of Things Environment

Abstract

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) is turning common conceptions of the current Internet into a dream of smart objects that communicate with each other. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play an important role in such an environment, since they include a wide range of applications. Researchers are already working on how WSN can be effectively integrated into the IoT environment. One part of the integration is the security aspect. In recent years, Farash et al. proposed an efficient user authentication and key agreement scheme for Heterogeneous WSN (HWSN) tailored for the IoT environment. Although their scheme is efficient, we found that this scheme is vulnerable to several cryptographic attacks. This paper first demonstrates all security weaknesses of the Farash et al.’s scheme and then proposes a secure and improved mutual authentication and key agreement scheme.