Simple Dynamic User Authentication Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

User authentication is a critical issue for wireless sensor networks which are deployed in unattended environments. It guarantees only legitimate users are allowed to login and access data. Since sensor nodes have limited computation power, storage, and energy, it is desirable for the authentication protocol to be simple and secure. We propose in this paper two simple user authentication protocols which are variations of a recent strong-password based solution. The computational load, communication cost, and security of the proposed protocols are evaluated. Compared with the previous scheme, our proposed protocols require less computational load and communication cost while providing the same or better security.