User Authentication with Distributed Cluster Formation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is an important aspect of any system and its development has enhanced widespread adoption of WSNs. In a typical situation, user wants to access the data directly from a node instead of accessing at the gateway or at the backend of an application system. Therefore, it is necessary that such an access is allowed only to a registered user. We present a user authentication scheme with distributed cluster formation in WSNs. This scheme works as a ring structure and uses one-way communication. In our protocol, three distinct components, gateway, user, and node, can mutually authenticate each other. In addition, we use S/Key algorithm as one-time password for authentication. Our analysis shows that our proposed scheme is as robust as conventional 4-way authentication scheme, while the communication overhead is substantially decreased.