Intrusion prevention with two-level user authentication in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a secure and scalable user authentication scheme for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks to prevent intrusions. Our scheme employs both public and secret key cryptography schemes, such that it takes advantages from both. Our analysis and simulation results show that our scheme is not only more secure and scalable than existing secret key cryptography–based schemes, but also requires less processing power and provides higher energy efficiency than existing public key cryptography–based schemes.