A novel two-factor multi-gateway authentication protocol for WSNs

With Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) rapid development, it is a hot topic that designing a secure and effective authentication protocol to guarantee the safety of WSNs. Many two-factor multi-gateway authentication protocols have been proposed for WSNs. However, almost all the known protocols were found insecure. Especially, all the existing two-factor multi-gateway authentication protocols cannot resist the password and identity(ID) guessing together with the smart card loss attack. We present a novel two-factor multi-gateway authentication protocol based on password and smart card in multi-gateway wireless sensor networks in this paper. Thanks to “fuzzy-verifier” and “honeywords” technique, the new protocol can effectively resist the joint password and identity guessing with the smart card loss attack. In addition, key negotiation is based on discrete elliptic curve encryption, which ensures forward security of the protocol and resists sensor capture attack. Subsequently, we use BAN-logic to ensure the authentication is implemented, and the session key is negotiated. Moreover, a formal security proof of the new protocol based on the game sequence is conducted in Random Oracle model (RO model). Finally, we compare our work with other schemes in the same field in terms of security, communication efficiency and computational efficiency.