Abstract:
Over the recent decade, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has gained attention because of its vast variety of applications. The WSNs applications have play a major role in our daily life activities start from healthcare, agriculture, industry, and transportation. Due to sensor nodes limited energy and memory capabilities, WSN has faced challenges and issues as compared to conventional wired networks. WSNs networks are the main target of security attacks because of its resource constrained nature. Recently, various security solutions for WSNs have been focused on symmetric encryption techniques for user authentication. However, many security solutions have suffered with overhead and complexities issues. Despite the fact that symmetric cryptography is more energy efficient than Public Key Cryptography (PKC), symmetric cryptosystems have significant disadvantages, such as key management. Furthermore, for WSN authentication, PKC with a resource-intensive method is unsuitable. Different authentication mechanisms have been designed with time but almost all of them are either complex or insecure and also resource exhausting. Recent studies on the deployment of authentication mechanisms in WSNs reveal that sensor nodes suffered a lot due to lack of a secure, quick, and lightweight authentication mechanism . There is need to improve the network security and reducing the resources utilization .. To overcome these issues, this thesis proposes a lightweight and less complex biometric based user authentication and key agreement scheme by using fuzzy extractor and one-way hash functions for authentication in WSN. The proposed scheme contains four phases: initialization, registration, authentication, and password renewal phase. It is used to resolve the complexities of existing WSNs by providing a secure authentication that is computationally inexpensive and provides a great resilience against a number of attacks. Finally, the proposed scheme is evaluated using several parameters such as security attacks, computational cost, and communication overhead to measure its effectiveness. The performance evaluation results showed that the proposed scheme is the most efficient solution when compared to the existing authentication schemes for WSNs, giving a reasonable trade-off between security and efficiency.
