An improved authentication and key management scheme in context of IoT-based wireless sensor network using ECC

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is used for sensing data/information from the nearby environment with the help of various spatially dispersed miniature sensor devices/nodes and forwarding the data to the direction of the base station which is connected to the network through the Internet for processing the collected data. Currently, Internet of Things (IoT) based smart computing applications are becoming popular in which WSN is used to run a process to output information from sensed data or events. However, these sensor nodes have less computation ability and low power capacity. In these resource-constrained WSNs, remote user authentication is a serious challenge that demands the attention of the researchers’ community. Several authentication protocols which address a variety of security concerns are present in the literature. Ghani et al. proposed an efficient authentication and key management scheme that claims to be resistant to known attacks. During the study of their scheme, we found that it is efficient and effective for protecting against a few attacks. However, it does not have the ability to counter several security threats like user impersonation attack, insider attack, database attack, and stolen smart card attack. To counter these aforesaid security loopholes, in this paper a new ECC integrated scheme suitable for IoT-based WSN with a higher level of protection is proposed. The informal security analysis using mathematical approaches and the formal security analysis using a well-accepted AVISPA simulator and BAN logic ensures that the suggested work is highly secure from all the relevant threats. Moreover, the performance analysis and comparison of the proposed scheme with the most recent relevant schemes proves that our scheme is much more efficient in terms of computation, communication, and storage overheads than all the available schemes in the literature.