An authentication and key agreement protocol based on hummingbird-2 and its application in WSNs

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is widely used in the areas like military detecting, health monitoring, transportation, environmental monitoring, fire alarm, etc. However, in order to guarantee the security of the communication for the WSNs, the traditional cryptographic schemes like the public key encryption and digital signature could not be applied to the sensor nodes of the WSNs because of its limited computation and storage. It is very important to devise secure and lightweight protocols for the authentication and key agreement between the sensors and the powerful devices like gateways or servers in WSNs. Based on the hummingbird-2, which is a lightweight symmetric encryption scheme, an authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed in this paper. We give the brief analysis for the proposed protocol to demonstrate its characteristics of against such attacks like impersonation, replay, man-in-the-middle, and denial-of-service, we also apply this protocol to the scenario of the nursing service for the aged, and the prototype application shows its feasibility.