Weaknesses of Temporal Credential-Based Mutual Authentication with a Multiple-Password Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are significant technologies in various fields. For example, they are used for monitoring dangerous places, medical and environmental monitoring, and military surveillance. Various studies have focused on the authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks. However, it is difficult to achieve perfect security performance and low overhead. Liu et al. proposed a scheme that uses multiple passwords to achieve three-factor security performance and generate a session key between the user and sensor nodes. They claim that security analysis shows that their scheme can withstand related attacks, including a lost password threat. Additionally, the comparison phase shows that Liu et al. scheme involves a relatively small overhead. However, this paper shows that Liu et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to off-line password attack, lack of anonymity, DoS attack, privileged insider attacks, and unclear transmission from the sensor node to the user.