Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/203

Robust biometric-based user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Debiao He

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are applied widely a variety of areas such as real-time traffic monitoring, measurement of seismic activity, wildlife monitoring and so on. User authentication in WSNs is a critical security issue due to their unattended and hostile deployment in the field. In 2010, Yuan et al. proposed the first biometric-based user authentication scheme for WSNs. However, Yoon et al. pointed out that Yuan et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the insider attack, user impersonation attack, GW-node impersonation attack and sensor node impersonate attack. To improve security, Yoon et al.’s proposed an improved scheme and claimed their scheme could withstand various attacks. Unfortunately, we will show Yoon et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the denial-of-service attack (DoS) and the sensor node impersonation attack. To overcome the weaknesses in Yoon et al.’s scheme, we propose a new biometric-based user authentication scheme for WSNs. The analysis shows our scheme is more suitable for practical applications.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Security; Authentication; Biometrics; Wireless sensor networks; Cryptography

Publication Info: The paper has not been published elsewhere.

Date: received 12 Apr 2012

Contact author: hedebiao at 163 com

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20120413:174444 (All versions of this report)

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion