Analyzing and Enhancing a User Authentication Scheme for Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

In 2018, He et al. worked on Chang and Le’s authentication method for ad hoc wireless sensor networks and found that it undergoes problems related to security. Based on their study of Chang and Le’s protocol, He et al. designed a scheme that can withstand various types of security threats. In this article, we analyze He et al.’s scheme and find that it has a few issues related to security. He et al.’s method cannot withstand the attack named as an insider attack; an adversary can disrupt the session key establishment; it does not support the validation of the owner of the smart card before initiating the authentication process; and lacks mutual authentication. To remove these problems from He et al.’s protocol, we present an enhanced authentication method for ad hoc wireless sensor networks.