An Efficient and Provable Multifactor Mutual Authentication Protocol for Multigateway Wireless Sensor Networks

As the most popular way of communication technology at the moment, wireless sensor networks have been widely concerned by academia and industry and plays an important role in military, agriculture, medicine, and other fields. Identity authentication offers the first line of defence to ensure the security communication of wireless sensor networks. Since the sensor nodes are resource-limited in the wireless networks, how to design an efficient and secure protocol is extremely significant. The current authentication protocols have the problem that the sensor nodes need to execute heavy calculation and communication consumption during the authentication process and cannot resist node capture attack, and the protocols also cannot provide perfect forward and backward security and cannot resist replay attack. Multifactor identity authentication protocols can provide a higher rank of security than single-factor and two-factor identity authentication protocols. The multigateway wireless sensor networks’ structure can provide a larger communication coverage area than the single-gateway network structure, so it has become the focus of recent studies. Therefore, we design a novel multifactor authentication protocol for multigateway wireless sensor networks, which only apply the lightweight hash function and are given biometric information to achieve a higher level of security and efficiency and a larger communication coverage area. We separately apply BAN logic, random oracle model, and AVISPA tool to validate the security of our authentication protocol in Case 1 and Case 2. We put forward sixteen evaluation criteria to comprehensively evaluate our authentication protocol. Compared with the related authentication protocols, our authentication protocol is able to achieve higher security and efficiency.