A Lightweight Multifactor Authentication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has become an information bridge between societies. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the emergent technologies that work as the main force in IoT. Applications based on WSN include environment monitoring, smart healthcare, user legitimacy authentication, and data security. Recently, many multifactor user authentication schemes for WSNs have been proposed using smart cards, passwords, as well as biometric features. Unfortunately, these schemes are shown to be susceptible towards several attacks and these includes password guessing attack, impersonation attack, and Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack due to non-uniform security evaluation criteria. In this paper, we propose a lightweight multifactor authentication scheme using only hash function of the timestamp (TS) and One Time Password (OTP). Furthermore, public key and private key is incorporated to secure the communication channel. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme satisfies all the security requirement and insusceptible towards some well-known attack (password guessing attack, impersonation attack and MITM).