Security Enhancement of an Authentication Scheme Based on DAC and Intel SGX in WSNs

Designing authentication techniques suitable for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with their dedicated consideration is critical due to the nature of public channel. In 2022, Liu et al. presented an authentication protocol which employs dynamic authentication credentials (DACs) and Intel software guard extensions (SGX) to guarantee security in WSNs, and it was shown that it is secure by formal and informal security analysis. In this paper, we show that it is not secure against desynchronization attack and offline guessing attack for long-term random numbers of users. In addition, it suffers from the known session-specific temporary information attack. Then, to address these vulnerabilities an improved authentication scheme using DAC and Intel SGX will be presented. It is shown that not only it is secure against aforementioned attacks with employing formal and informal analysis, but also it has a reasonable communication and computation overhead. It should be highlighted that the communication and computation overheads of our proposal are increased negligibly, but it provides more security features compared to the baseline protocol.