A Lightweight User Authentication Scheme for Multi-Gateway Based Wireless Sensor Networks Using Rabin Cryptosystem

The existing authentication schemes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are mostly used in single-gateway mode. With the wide deployment of WSNs, the drawbacks of single-gateway mode are gradually becoming more noticeable. In traditional single-gateway WSNs, high-speed data streams are prone to conflict during data aggregation, which may reduce the performance of the network. Most of the existing multi-gateway schemes are based on lightweight operations such as hash functions, exclusive OR (XOR), and symmetric encryption algorithms, which cannot achieve forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a lightweight multi-gateway authentication scheme based on the Rabin cryptosystem. Since Rabin only requires a module-square operation for encryption, its computational overhead is relatively low. Therefore, the encryption operation is usually used on the sensor side with resource constraints to save resources. In addition, Scyther is used to prove the security of the proposed scheme. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve higher security with lower computational overhead.