LAEC: Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Energy-Efficient and Cost-Effective Communication in Wireless Sensor Network Environments

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which are applicable to environmental monitoring, healthcare, and industrial automation, play crucial roles in various sectors of society. In a WSN environment, data containing personal and confidential user information are used for communication. However, due to the inherent characteristics of WSNs, network packets can easily be intercepted, facilitating the execution of replay, impersonation, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Security protocols in WSNs must be handled cautiously to resist various attacks over the network. In addition, fast and efficient computations are required due to WSNs transferring a significant amount of data. This study proposes a new protocol, namely, the lightweight authentication protocol for energy-efficient and cost-effective communication (LAEC) in WSN environments, to perform computations and cloud integration efficiently. Our LAEC protocol satisfies 11 security requirements, including protection against man-in-the-middle, replay, and impersonation attacks. Furthermore, LAEC passes formal verification tests using ProVerif and Scyther. We analyze the performance of LAEC by comparing it with eight recently proposed protocols. LAEC exhibits superior performance, with communication and computational costs that are approximately 6.21% higher and 433.85% faster than those of the other eight considered protocols, respectively.