Resilience of DoS Attacks in Designing Anonymous User Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) include spatially allotted autonomous instruments that employ sensors to check environmental or physical conditions. These autonomous instruments or nodes blend with routers or gateway to make several WSN-based real-time applications. In many critical applications, an external user can directly access the real-time data from sensor node. In this context, before offering access, the legitimacy of the user is required to be verified through a secure authentication scheme. Since, in WSN-based real-time applications, the privacy of the user is greatly important, the authentication scheme for such environment should be anonymous. Till now, impressive efforts have been made in designing lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for WSN-based real-time applications. However, most of such protocols are vulnerable to DoS attacks, which are occurred due to the loss of synchronization between the participants. Furthermore, to rebuilt synchronization between the participants, a protocol may need to compromise un-link-ability property. Therefore, it can be argued that the problem of DoS attack has not been addressed properly in the existing literatures. In this paper, we present a way to deal with DoS attacks in designing lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for WSN-based real-time applications without compromising any anonymity support. We argue that our proposed solution can easily be incorporated with the existing schemes to be resilient to DoS attacks.