Simple, Secure, Efficient, Lightweight and Token Based Protocol for Mutual Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are being widely used in many real time applications that require continuous monitoring and maintenance of surroundings and their environment. Communication is a vital operation in WSN and most of the times the data is confidential. Hence, security of data is a major concern in WSN and it has been observed that a secure authentication mechanism will ensure confidentiality and integrity of data in WSN. Many authentication mechanisms have been designed but most of them require the sensor nodes to have much computational resources, involves much communication and storage overheads and are quite complex. In this paper, we propose a simple, secure, dynamic, scalable, efficient and lightweight protocol for mutual authentication of nodes in WSN. The protocol is based on tokens, each sensor node acquires a token from base station (BS) and later on without any involvement of BS sensor nodes mutually authenticate each other using acquired tokens. The proposed protocol was modeled in scyther for verification and no potential attacks were detected.