SMAC-AS: MAC Based Secure Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

User authentication is an elementary security prerequisite in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Recently, Amin et al. presented an anonymity preserving authentication scheme for WSN which is secure against both active and passive attacks. In this paper, we first cryptanalyzed Amin et al. scheme and find that it suffers from the password guessing, impersonation, session key leakage attacks. To address these deficiencies, we propose a secure authentication scheme for wireless sensor network (SMAC-AS) by using MAC function. It additionally uses symmetric encryption and decryption operations for authentication to prevent forgery. We use OTCODE as one time activation code that is more secure than password. The SMAC-AS is a low cost and much faster in practice because it uses light weight MAC function and symmetric operations. Decryption of MAC is not easy. Moreover, SMAC-AS also helps in faster and efficient transmission of the message because of the lightweight function and operations which leads to saving the battery of the sensor nodes. We use BAN logic for authentication proof. The formal security analysis using random oracle model is done to show its efficacy.