Cryptanalysis of the Lightweight and Anonymous Authentication and Access Control for Real-time Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes collect different types of data from the environment and
not all collected data has the same security importance. Basically, for real-time applications, user authentication
to ensure that only authorized users can access sensor nodes is critical, but access control
that allows users with different privileges to access data according to their privileges is also important.
Recently, Adavoudi-Jolfaei et al. proposed an improved three-factor authentication scheme by
providing more desired security properties such as three-factor authentication and access control. In
this paper, however, we show that the Adavoudi-Jolfaei et al.’s scheme has security flaws; a user
collusion attack, de-synchronization attack, and no providing sensor node anonymity. We present
simple countermeasures against the security flaws we have found.