An Enhanced Access Control Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, Huang proposed a new access control scheme based on elliptic curve cryptosystem which prevents malicious nodes from joining the sensor network. This scheme uses the expiration time of nodes so that the nodes can only authenticate with its neighbor nodes within that time. In this paper, we first show that though this scheme is efficient, but it has a fatal weakness such as it is vulnerable to an active attack known as man-in-the-middle attack. In order to remedy that weakness we propose a more efficient and secure access control scheme as compared with Huang's scheme. Further, our scheme is significantly better in terms of performance and security compared with other related access control schemes. In fact, our scheme requires significantly less communication costs as compared to other related schemes. Moreover, we simulate our scheme for formal security analysis using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool and show that our scheme is secure.