Light Weight Authentication framework for WSN

Primarily deployed for monitoring environmental parameters, WSN are now finding increased use in commercial, domestic, military and health applications. There deployment in hostile terrains and for mission critical applications touching human lives call for addressing their security issue. Especially under IoT and smart city projects like Padova Smart City project, the range of applications envisioned to be developed, would be tightly coupled to the physical world where security aspects would be paramount. This paper presents a light weight Authentication Framework which supports node registration, entity authentication, key establishment, new node injection and broadcast authentication of messages diffusing from base towards nodes in WSN. The solution leverages the low computational overheads associated with cryptographically secure one-way hash chains and ECC without using any digital signature algorithm. The usage of hidden generator point derived by using hash-chains provides defence against man-in-the middle attack a prominent feature in ECDH. The proposed framework is compared with other similar Schemes like Novel Access Control Protocol for secure Sensor Networks (NACP).