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Over recent years the demand for wireless sensor networks is increasing drastically and it find its use in the area of healthcare (Sumathi, 2020; Sethi & Sahoo, 2020), defense (Laouira, et al. 2019), industry (Lin & Cheung, 2020), research (Jaladi et al., 2020), home (Ojuroye et al., 2017), institutes (Lachhab et al., 2017), environment (Patil et al., 2019), etc. However, the involved sensors used for sensing the parameters are resource-constrained, equipped with a limited battery, processing power, and memory. They are easy to deploy with minimal maintenance and provide interesting outcomes making them preferable in several fields. Various authentication schemes are present in the literature and provide authentication for performing payments (Narwal, 2019) and applied in WBANs (Narwal & Mohapatra, 2018). There are primarily three agents involved in WSNs namely the user (Ui), the gateway (GW), and the sensor (SENj) node. The diminutive SENs are positioned in the required areas (depending on the application) and after deployment communicate with each other and with other agents (the gateway node GW) wirelessly. All these sensor nodes are wirelessly linked with the neighboring nodes and the Gateway, which all-together forms one network and is called Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In the current scenario, it can be observed that WSNs are too intelligent and play an integral part in our lives. The applications of WSN (Li et al., 2019) can improve efficiency in many areas as mentioned. However, the security of WSNs is a major concern as they are susceptible to numerous attacks such as tampering, replay, etc. and these malicious minds use sensitive data to benefit themselves. So, it is important to normalize access only to the authenticated WSNs over the air. It can be achieved by using an anonymous and secured authentication scheme that preserves integrity and confidentiality while consenting only the legitimate users to get hold of the data. There have been many similar schemes that provide anonymous authentication (Gope et al., 2019; Zhang & Wen, 2019), but are insecure against sensor node capturing attacks (Narwal et al., 2019), tampering, eavesdropping, spoofing invasions, sensor node anonymity, password guessing attacks, etc. and some schemes fail to provide integrity.
Gateway is one of the main agents and plays an important role in WSN equipped with a very powerful storage center and powerful data processing with very good battery power to beat the lifetime of all the sensor nodes (SENs). It commands the SENs and acts as a registration authority to get users registered and assists as a gateway for the other network or an admittance way for the human interface. The enormous distances over which these diminutive and resource-impeded sensors communicate largely affect the power dissipation of sensors. Therefore, an introduction of a gateway node aids in bridging the distance between the sensor node and user agent hence elongating the lifecycle of SENs. These sensors sense and congregate data and this sensed data is then routed to the GW node where it processes the obtained data (e.g., arithmetical analysis) for forming decisions or can be utilized as per the requirement. Since the data about the user is easily attainable due to the insufficient physical security of these sensors, a user authentication scheme is obligatory to corroborate the security. The SENs have a limited radio transmission range, limited memory size, low data processing, and low battery power, this is the reason why the mutual authentication scheme for the WSNs must be categorized with very fast algorithms, a lesser amount of power consumption, and short communication messages. The user’s login request is forwarded to the GW node after the data processing is completed in the GW, which later gives instructions to SENs on whether to reply to the Ui’s request or not. And that is how, the three agents work together, and become capable of mutually authenticating one another to evade possible attacks at the end of any node.
The major contributions of AMAKA are as follows: