Cryptanalysis on Privacy-Aware Two-Factor Authentication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Das first proposed two-factor authentication combining the smart card and password to resolve the security problems of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). After that, various researchers studied twofactor authentication suitable for WSNs. In user authentication protocols based on the symmetric key approach, a number of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based authentication protocols have been proposed. To resolve the security and efficiency problems of ECC-based two-factor authentication protocols, Jiang et al. proposed a privacy-aware two-factor authentication protocol based on ECC for WSNs. However, this paper performs a vulnerability analysis on Jiang et al.’s authentication protocol and shows that it has security problems, such as a lack of mutual authentication, a risk of SID modification and DoS attacks, a lack of sensor anonymity, and weak ID anonymity.