Paper 2011/293

Weakness of a Secured Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Elliptic Curves Cryptography

W. Han

Abstract

Authenticating remote users in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is an important security issue due to their un-attended and hostile deployments. Usually, sensor nodes are equipped with limited computing power, storage, and communication module, thus authenticating remote users in such resource constrained environment is a critical security concern. Recently, Yeh et al. proposed a two-factor user authentication scheme in WSN and claimed that his scheme is secure against different kind of attacks. However, in this paper, we prove that Yeh et al. scheme has some critical security pitfalls and is not recommended for real application. We point out that have the following weakness: 1) no mutual authentication between the user and the sensor node, 2) no perfect forward secrecy, 3)no key agreement between the user and the sensor node.