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A Secure and Scalable Group Access Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

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Abstract

Recently, in 2013, Wu et al. proposed an efficient adaptable and scalable group access control scheme (GAC) for managing wireless sensor networks and they claimed that their proposed GAC approach provides the forward secrecy and backward secrecy, and it also prevents the man-in-the-middle attack. However, in this paper, we revisit Wu et al.’s scheme and show that Wu et al.’s scheme fails to provide the forward and backward secrecy to the group access key (GAK), and also their scheme does not prevent the man-in-the-middle attack and it does not provide the mutual authentication between a node and the task manager. Moreover, in Wu et al.’s scheme, all the past GAKs used by a node can be revealed to an adversary when that node is compromised. We then aim to propose a novel group access control mechanism to withstand the security weaknesses found in Wu et al.’s scheme while retaining the original merits of their scheme. Through the rigorous informal security analysis and the formal security analysis using the widely-accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic, we show that our scheme is secure against various known attacks including the attacks found in Wu et al.’s scheme. Moreover, in our scheme, the vulnerability of the GAKs used by a node is limited and bounded to the last GAK update protocol interval when that node is compromised by an adversary. Our scheme provides efficient dynamic properties such as joining and leaving of a node from a group along with high security and the required desirable features as compared to Wu et al.’s scheme, and as a result, our scheme is very suitable for the practical applications.

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Acknowledgments

A part of this paper (cryptanalysis of Wu et al.’s scheme in Sect. 4) appeared in the Proceedings of Security in Computing and Communications (SSCC 2014), Communications in Computer and Information Science Series (CCIS), volume 467, pages 10–19, 2014 [38]. The authors would like to acknowledge the many helpful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers and the Editor of this Journal, which have improved the content and presentation of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, 721 302, India

    Vanga Odelu & Adrijit Goswami

  2. Center for Security, Theory and Algorithmic Research, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, 500 032, India

    Ashok Kumar Das

Authors
  1. Vanga Odelu
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  2. Ashok Kumar Das
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  3. Adrijit Goswami
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Correspondence to Ashok Kumar Das.

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Odelu, V., Das, A.K. & Goswami, A. A Secure and Scalable Group Access Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 85, 1765–1788 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2866-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2866-4

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