Secure Lightweight Authentication With Anonymous Data Access for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

Unattended wireless sensor networks (U-WSNs) are deployed in various scenarios, including disaster relief, environmental monitoring, and medical applications. These differ from traditional WSNs because they do not have a permanent, stationary sink to collect and analyze data. However, given the potentially sensitive information, secure data transmission with privacy preservation is a major concern. This paper proposes a provably secure lightweight authentication with anonymous data access (PSLA-ADA). Appropriate key agreement protocols were extensively researched to examine the key properties of cryptographic protocols. Moreover, the proposed PSLA-ADA framework employs three-factor authentication with an anonymous data access strategy to ensure perfect forward secrecy, providing a significant degree of efficient security. Formal and informal analyses show that the proposed PSLA-ADA secures data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. Using a practical testbed, the proposed PSLA-ADA shows better performance in terms of transmission efficiency ($\approx 91.63\%$) and overhead ratio (at a reduced cost of$\approx 17.67\%$) compared to other representative approaches.