Energy Efficient WSN Sink-Cloud Server Authentication Protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) find applications in critical domains where they are deployed to collect mission critical data. The transmission of this private and sensitive data over untrusted communication channels exposes it to several security and privacy attacks. To curb these threats, security schemes have been presented that employ machine learning, bilinear pairing, elliptic curve cryptosystems and biometrics among other approaches. However, machine learning algorithms and bilinear pairing operations have extremely high computation overheads, which is unsuitable for sensor devices. Schemes based on biometrics are susceptible to privileged insider attackers who may collect and misuse user data, while most of the elliptic curve cryptosystems are based on asymmetric cryptography which is inefficient. In light of this, we present an energy efficient and secure authentication scheme. Security evaluation demonstrates that this protocol offers strong mutual authentication and is resilient against impersonation, node capture, stolen verifier untraceability, offline password guessing and anonymity attacks. In terms of performance, it exhibits the lowest computation overheads, energy consumption and average communication overheads.