A provably secure authentication framework for quantum-safe message transmission in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been heavily deployed to facilitate continuous monitoring of their environments as they collect the necessary data which enable autonomous decision making or predictive control. As such, these networks have found applications in fields such as smart agriculture, military, industrial automation, and healthcare. During the message transfers among sensors or between sensors and mobile sinks, public communication channels are deployed. This exposes the collected data to a myriad of security threats such as tampering, eavesdropping, and replay. Although the recent past has witnessed the development of numerous security frameworks for this ecosystem, most of the current solutions are defenseless against threats such as session hijacking, side-channeling, ephemeral secret leakages and quantum attacks. In this paper, we leverage on lattice cryptography to develop an effective authentication framework for the WSNs. Formal security analysis confirms the robustness of our protocol under the Random Oracle Model (ROM). In addition, extensive semantic security analyses demonstrate the resilience of the proposed framework against typical attacks such as denial of service, key compromise and forgery. In terms of performance, we show that the developed framework incurs slightly lower computation and energy overheads when compared with its peers.