Symmetric hash function based secure and efficient authenticated key exchange mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Authenticated Key Exchange is one of the prominent security requirement of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to reduce the possibility of various security attacks. In this paper, we propose symmetric hash function and bloom filter based secure authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for WSNs. The proposed protocol is appropriate for authentication of the users without pre-alignment between the test and the registered minutia points of the fingerprint for multi-hop WSNs. The proposed protocol eliminates unauthorized query information circulation at the initial level (i.e., at the sensor node itself) to prevent bogus information flooding from the sensor nodes to the gateway node. We show that the proposed protocol resists the resource exhaustion attacks associated with WSNs of large hop count (i.e., a large number of intermediary sensor nodes through which information must pass between source sensor node and the trusted gateway node). We present both the formal and informal security analysis of the proposed protocol using AVISPA tool and basic cryptography concepts. The analysis of computational overhead demonstrates that our proposed protocol is preferable for resource-constrained sensor motes like MicaZ. The security analysis and performance evaluation reveal that the proposed protocol is more secure, effective and resilient in comparison to other existing protocols.