A Secure Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network in Smart Vehicular System

Abstract

As wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Internet of things (IoT) have rapidly developed over recent years, the smart vehicular system is designed in the environment of WSN to provide vehicle related applications such as traffic safety for drivers, controlling traffic signal, broadcasting traffic information and speed monitoring etc. Recently, Mohit et al. have proposed an authentication protocol for WSN-based smart vehicular system. Their protocol consists of three main entities namely vehicle sensor, sink node and user. Vehicle sensors collected traffic data and send it to a sink node of WSN. User used traffic data from sink node in off-line mode for the traffic management. Mohit et al. claimed that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks such as untraceable, impersonation and password guessing attacks. However, their proposed protocol still has some vulnerabilities such as absence of session key, suffering user duplication and sink node impersonation attacks. Thus their protocol cannot guarantee complete security. In this paper, we aim to propose an improved protocol based on their work which overcomes these security loopholes in their protocol. The informal security analysis shows that our proposed protocol is cable to defend the security weaknesses found in Mohit et al.’s authentication protocol.