Lightweight three factor scheme for real-time data access in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have rapidly increased to be applicable in many different areas due to their wireless mobile connectivity, large scale deployment and ad hoc network. However, these characteristics make WSNs usually deployed in unattended and hostile field, which may bring some new threats such as information tampering and eavesdropping attacks, etc. User authentication is one of the most important security services that allowed the legitimate user to query and collect the real-time data from a sensor node in WSN. Since the sensor nodes are resource-constrained devices which have limited storage, power and computing resource, the proposed authentication scheme should be low cost and lightweight. Recently, Gope et al. proposed a two-factor lightweight authentication scheme for real-time data access in WSN. However, according to the analysis, there still exist several drawbacks in their scheme as well as in other two-factor schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight three-factor authentication scheme for WSN to withstand such threats as well as providing higher operational efficiency than most of the recently presented schemes. Both analysis and simulation show that our scheme is more suitable for the security real-time data access in WSN.