A Provably Secure Three-Factor Authentication Protocol Based on Chebyshev Chaotic Mapping for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network has been widely used and plays a vital role in the Internet of Things, smart cities, military, and other fields, and its security has also attracted the attention of many researchers. In view of the security defects in Shin and Kwon’s scheme such as failure to provide three-factor security, lack of anonymity and untraceability, user impersonation attack, desynchronization attack and privileged insider attack, we suggest an improved provably secure three-factor user authentication scheme based on Chebyshev chaotic mapping for wireless sensor network, which employs fuzzy verifier technique to prevent attacker from offline guessing attack on user identity and password when the stolen/lost smartcard is acquired by the attacker. During the authentication phase, a dynamic identity mechanism is used to ensure the anonymity of the user and sensor to prevent desynchronization attack, and the Chebyshev chaotic mapping is introduced to improve security and reduce computation overhead. The rigorous security proof under the random oracle model and the formal verification via ProVerif show that our protocol overcomes the weaknesses in Shin and Kwon’s scheme. In addition, by comparing the performance of our proposed scheme with that of others, we demonstrate that our proposal not only solves the security risks of Shin and Kwon.’s protocol, but also achieves a better tradeoff between security and efficiency, therefore, it is more suitable for user authentication in wireless sensor network environments.