Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of attention due to its applications in many areas including health, agriculture, industry and transportation, etc. There are many technologies such as Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that have been used to implement the IoT. The IoT uses WSN as a basic technology that provides access to sensors which collect required parameters. These sensors suffer from limitations such as low computation capability, small memory and limited energy resources, which make WSN security a major challenge. Authentication is one of the essential security services that ensure the data access legitimacy in WSN. Porambage et al. proposed an authentication protocol for WSN applications in the distributed IoT. Based on the reviews and analysis of this protocol, it was found that it cannot resist many attacks, including user impersonation, sensor impersonation and man-in-the-middle attacks. To Overcome these weaknesses, an authentication protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for WSN in the IoT is developed and described in this paper. The security and performance of the proposed protocol have been evaluated and compared with Porambage et al.’s protocol. The comparison results showed that the proposed protocol is 49.88% more efficient in terms of computation cost and communication cost, and has a higher security level by eliminating the above mentioned attacks