Post-quantum secure authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless sensor networks

In today’s digital world, our communication medium has become wireless. The addition of many sensor devices in wireless connection forms a wireless sensor network (WSN). To achieve data security in WSN, an efficient, secure, and authorized communication mechanism is required among remote entities. Many computationally efficient authenticated key agreement (AKA) schemes have been proposed to ensure secure and authorized communication in the pre-quantum era for WSNs. The security of most of these schemes relies on the hardness of either factoring or discrete log problem. Due to Shor’s algorithm, these problems can be solved in polynomial time on any high-scale quantum computer. Hence, the AKA schemes proposed using classical cryptographic schemes will become insecure once the high-scale quantum computer becomes a reality. So, there is a requirement for the construction of new AKA designs which can resist quantum attacks. This article presents a lattice-based AKA for WSN to achieve the goal of post-quantum security and efficiency. The proposed solution is achieved using the computational problem of ring learning with errors (RLWE), where the user establishes authorized and secure communication with sensors. We have demonstrated a formal security analysis of our proposed scheme. The analysis of performance along with a comparative study are also included regarding performance comparison with existing schemes.