A novel authentication and key agreement protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network of small sensor nodes, self configuring and communicating using radio signals. They are deployed to sense the physical world. These small ubiquitous devices are integrated in different scenarios and ensure wide range of applications. Since these networks provide low cost solutions to many real world applications, they are quickly gaining popularity and rapid growth, so is the security newlinerequirements of the network. It is imperative that the security designs are considered from the beginning of the system design as the networks may interact with sensitive information and also they are deployed in an unattended environment. Hence, security is an important field of research in WSN. However, due to the intrinsic constraints in the network providing newlinesecurity solutions is a challenging task. Currently there are many research solutions for securing the transmitted data by encryption, i.e. data confidentiality. These potent algorithms provoked the interest in finding the solutions in the field of authentication. Hence, in this work a novel authentication framework has been proposed, incorporating a new hash function MBLAKE. It follows a chopped Merkle-Damgard construction and newlineindifferentiable from Random oracle. A sponge based construction is followed in MBLAKE so as to minimize the computation time without any trade-off in security. The computation time of the most popular hash functions and the proposed hash function are compared and found to be efficient than the ones traditionally used. Two different scenarios are considered for providing authentication; communications between the base station and the sensor nodes newlineare provided with one way authentication and the communication between the nodes are secured by authenticating them mutually. A challenge response authentication technique is used for one way authentication and signature based authentication is followed for mutual authentication. newline newline