Security analysis and improvements of two-factor mutual authentication with key agreement in wireless sensor networks

User authentication and key management are two important security issues in WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks). In WSNs, for some applications, the user needs to obtain real-time data directly from sensors and several user authentication schemes have been recently proposed for this case. We found that a two-factor mutual authentication scheme with key agreement in WSNs is vulnerable to gateway node bypassing attacks and user impersonation attacks using secret data stored in sensor nodes or an attacker's own smart card. In this paper, we propose an improved scheme to overcome these security weaknesses by storing secret data in unique ciphertext form in each node. In addition, our proposed scheme should provide not only security, but also efficiency since sensors in a WSN operate with resource constraints such as limited power, computation, and storage space. Therefore, we also analyze the performance of the proposed scheme by comparing its computation and communication costs with those of other schemes.