A Robust and Energy Efficient Authentication Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology and expected to provide solutions for various industrial fields. As a basic technology of the IoT, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used to collect the required environment parameters for specific applications. Due to the resource limitation of sensor node and the open nature of wireless channel, security has become an enormous challenge in WSN. Authentication as a basic security service can be used to guarantee the legality of data access in WSN. Recently, Chang and Le proposed two authentication protocols for WSN for different security requirements. However, their protocol cannot provide proper mutual authentication and has other security and functionality defects. We present a three-factor user authentication protocol for WSN to remove the weaknesses of previous protocols. The security of the proposed protocol is analyzed, and the security, functionality and performance of our protocol are compared with other related protocols. The comparison results and simulation results by NS-3 show that the proposed protocol is robust and energy efficient for IoT applications.