Analysis on Security Vulnerabilities of a Password-based User Authentication Scheme for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

The numerous improved schemes of user authentication based on password have been proposed in order to prevent the data access from the unauthorized person. The importance of user authentication has been remarkably growing in the expanding application areas of wireless sensor networks. Recently, emerging wireless sensor networks possesses a hierarchy among the nodes which are divided into cluster heads and sensor nodes. Such hierarchical wireless sensor networks have more operational advantages by reducing the energy consumption and traffic load. In 2012, Das et al. proposed a user authentication scheme to be applicable for the hierarchical wireless sensor networks. Das et al. claimed that their scheme is effectively secure against the various security flaws. In this paper, author will prove that Das et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack, password guessing/change attack and does not support mutual authentication between the user and the cluster heads.