A Lightweight and Secure Data Authentication Scheme with Privacy Preservation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used to collect data. However, WSNs are usually deployed in unattended or hostile environment in which an adversary might attempt to introduce fraudulent data into the WSNs and cause error decision at upper level. Therefore, data authentication is desired in WSNs. In addition, in some applications (e.g. military applications), privacy is also an inevitable problem, which threatens the security of networks. However, existing data authentication schemes only provide authentication, but pay no attention to privacy. In this paper, we propose a data authentication scheme providing privacy preservation based on encryption scheme, pseudonym technology and message authentication code. Theoretical analysis shows that our scheme not only provides data authentication and privacy preservation, but also has a good performance in terms of communication and computation overhead. Besides, the proposed scheme also has advantages in security compared to prior solutions and we analyze the security of the scheme using BAN logic.