Energy Efficient Three-Factor Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks With Resisting Insider Attacks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play an important role in many fields such as industry, medical treatment, and national defense. Due to the limited node resources, there has always been an intractable contradiction between WSNs security and energy consumption. This contradiction needs urgent attention, especially with the increasing capability of attackers. User authentication is a key technology to ensure the security of WSNs. Unfortunately, recent insider attacks have shown vulnerabilities in the registration and authentication processes of traditional protocols. This paper analyzes the common types of insider attacks and focuses on explaining the logic of the offline guess attack launched by insiders. In order to uphold the concept of green communication, this paper proposes a new energy efficient protocol based on the widely used three-factor authentication. For the first time, the protocol combines lightweight data hiding technology to protect against offline guess and insider attacks. Experiments and analyses show that the proposed scheme not only solves the insider attack problem, but also reduces the energy consumption compared with the current typical schemes.