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

The numerous improved schemes of remote user authentication based on password have been proposed in order to overcome the security weakness in user authentication process. Recently, some of biometric-based user authentication schemes to use personal biometric information have been introduced and they have shown the relatively higher security and the enhanced convenience as compared to traditional password-based schemes. These days wireless sensor network is a fundamental technology in face of the ubiquitous era. The wireless sensor networks to collect and process the data from sensor nodes in increasing high-tech applications require important security issues to prevent the data access from the unauthorized person. Accordingly, the research to apply to the user authentication to the wireless sensor networks has been under the progress. In 2010, Yuan et al. proposed a biometric-based user authentication scheme to be applicable for wireless sensor networks. Yuan et al. claimed that their scheme is effectively secure against the various security flaws including the stolen verifier attack. In this paper, author will prove that Yuan et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to the password guessing attack, user impersonation attack and the replay attack, by analyzing their security weakness.