One Cycle With N Messages: A Secure and Lightweight Key Agreement Scheme for WSNs

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in various critical applications. Secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement (AKA) schemes under resource-constrained WSNs are crucial to guarantee security. A wealth of AKA schemes have been proposed, yet most of them are often found to be either insufficient in security or poor in performance. To design a scheme with robust security and better performance in both single-gateway and multi-gateway WSNs, we propose a novel secure and lightweight three-factor AKA scheme under one cycle with N messages mode, where its communication process between <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$N$</tex> participants requires only <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$N$</tex> messages in one cycle. Furthermore, we adopt enhanced Chebyshev polynomials to reduce computation overheads while ensuring computational difficulties against attacks and to provide secure access between remote users and sensor nodes with forward secrecy and multi-factor security. The security of this scheme is proved under the random-oracle model and the informal security analysis further demonstrates that our scheme succeeds in meeting all evaluation criteria in the face of the state-of-the-art threat model. At last, we conduct adequate comparisons respectively with single-gateway and multi-gateway schemes. Compared to sixteen state-of-the-art schemes in terms of security and performance, to our best knowledge, our scheme achieves all the security requirements with minimum communication overheads among all competitors and minimum computation overheads among all multi-gateway schemes. We believe that our work takes a substantial step towards a better trade-off between security and efficiency for AKA schemes in WSNs.