Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have great potential for numerous domains of application because of their ability to sense and\nunderstand unattended environments. However, a WSN is subject to various attacks due to the openness of the public wireless\nchannel. Therefore, a secure authentication mechanism is vital to enable secure communication within WSNs, and many studies\non authentication techniques have been presented to build robust WSNs. Recently, Lu et al. analyzed the security defects of the\nprevious ones and proposed an anonymous three-factor authenticated key agreement protocol for WSNs. However, we found that\ntheir protocol is vulnerable to some security weaknesses, such as the offline password guessing attack, known session-specific\ntemporary information attack, and no session key backward secrecy. We propose a lightweight security-improved three-factor\nauthentication scheme for WSNs to overcome the previously stated weaknesses. In addition, the improved scheme is proven to be\nsecure under the random oracle model, and a formal verification is conducted by ProVerif to reveal that the proposal achieves the\nrequired security features. Moreover, the theoretical analysis indicates that the proposal can resist known attacks. A comparison\nwith related works demonstrates that the proposed scheme is superior due to its reasonable performance and additional\nsecurity features.
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