On the Security of a Realistic Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Protocol for Securing Real-Time Application Data Access in Wireless Sensor Networks

Most recently, Cope and Hwang (IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 2016. doi:10.1109/TIE.2016.2585081) proposed a realistic lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for securing real-time application data access in wireless sensor networks(WSNs). They demonstrated that the scheme could resist various attacks. However, in this paper, we find out that Gope and Hwang's scheme suffers from several security flaws, including smart card loss attack, known session-specific temporary information attack, de-synchronization attack, and known transaction sequence number attack. Some possible countermeasures are provided to avoid these design flaws in the future design of lightweight authentication schemes.