A secure and efficient user authentication protocol for two-tiered wireless sensor networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are susceptible to attacks and sensor nodes have limited resources, designing a secure and efficient user authentication protocol for WSNs is a difficult task. Considering that most future large-scale WSNs follow a two-tiered architecture, we propose an efficient and Denial-of-Service resistant user authentication scheme for two-tiered WSNs, which imposes very light computational load and requires simple operations such as one-way hash function and exclusive-OR operations. In addition, there is a growing requirement for preserving user anonymity recently. Thus we introduce pseudonym identity for each user which is concealed in login messages. And through clever design, our proposed scheme can prevent from smart card breach. Moreover, the security analysis on this scheme demonstrates that our proposed scheme enjoys security attributes such as preventing the various kinds of attacks and user anonymity. Finally, performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is simple and efficient.