Wireless sensor network (WSN) has wide potential application in various fields such as military, agricultural and healthcare. WSNs need effective security mechanisms because they are deployed in hostile unattended environments. Various user authentication schemes were proposed for WSNs security. However, there are many previous schemes that have various security vulnerabilities including masquerading, password guessing attack and traceability. This paper proposes an unlinkable user authenticated key agreement scheme (UAKA) for multi-gateway WSNs that could achieve desirable security and privacy attributes. It preserves all the original merits of the related schemes and the security of UAKA is analyzed using the BAN Logic. Furthermore, the performance of UAKA is comparable to the related existing schemes.

Keywords:
Wireless sensor network, Information security, Multi-gateway, Unlinkability, Anonymity, Authentication, Key agreement