Hybrid Multi-Gateway Authentication Protocol for 6LoWPAN-Based Marine Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a secure and efficient three-factor authentication scheme to address the security issues in the integration scenario of multi-gateway wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and 6LoWPAN in marine Internet of Things (IoT). Existing approaches exhibit vulnerabilities to cryptographic breaches, single-point failures, high computational costs, and inefficient long-distance transmission in maritime settings. To mitigate these limitations, we integrate blockchain technology, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT), and a dynamic credential update mechanism to achieve lightweight strong authentication. The scheme supports cross-gateway collaborative authentication to avoid single point of failure and optimizes energy consumption through 6LoWPAN header compression. Security analyses, including BAN logic verification, informal security analyses, and ProVerif validation, demonstrate that the proposed scheme resists cryptographic attacks (e.g., replay and man-in-the-middle attacks) and privilege escalation attacks while achieving anonymity and forward secrecy, thereby ensuring secure mutual authentication and key agreement. Experiments demonstrate 40.5% lower computational costs, 62.2% reduced communication overheads, and 11.7% lower storage overheads compared with the most comparable existing multi-gateway scheme, proving its suitability for resource-constrained marine WSNs. This study provides a practical solution for secure data collection in marine IoT, while also meeting lightweight communication requirements.