The main disadvantage of one-way authentication is that a node is not able to know whether it is connected with a legal entity or a fake one; therefore, the mutual trust between the two communicating parties is zero. In addition, to perform node authentication in key management schemes, there is no 100% guarantee that a shared key will be found. Due to the lack of mutual authentication in the network devices, the dynamic session key has the lowest priority. Moreover, to perform the authentication between two nodes/devices, high numbers of keys are suggested to a sensor node in [28,30,37]. However, the high numbers of keys may pose the Sybil threats to the applications if a node is compromised by an adversary.

In [31�C33,35], a sensor node required a smaller number of keys to perform the authentication, but authors did not care for strong mutual authentication and session key establishment, node privacy, and message confidentiality and freshness. Therefore an efficient and adaptive mutual authentication framework remains a challenge for real WSN applications.To address mutual authentication in WSNs-based applications, this paper introduces an efficient and adaptive mutual authentication framework that exploits the features of symmetric key cryptography and provides strong mutual authentication and strong key establishment, message confidentiality, node identity and location privacy, and message freshness. The proposed scheme makes use of the pre-deployment location of sensors nodes which improve the application processes and operational efficiencies [16,28,32].

The proposed framework is very simple and performs the following tasks:Firstly, sensor nodes (L-sensor and H-sensor) obtain the required keys from an offline key server, as in [30�C33].Secondly, a secure network (cluster) formation takes place where the L-sensor and H-sensor mutually authenticate each other and establish a strong dynamic session key.Thirdly, a key revocation mechanism copes with the case of compromised L-sensor nodes, if found in the network.Finally, a new L-sensor node addition technique facilitates the node Drug_discovery scalability to the application and supports maximum network size.This paper further demonstrates the correctness of the proposed framework using Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, which is a quite popular logic for verifying mutual authentication and session-key establishment schemes [39,40].

The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme offers strong safeguards against possible security attacks such as impersonation attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks and information-leakage attacks.The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the system model, threat model and design goals. Section 3 discusses the related work and Section 4 introduces the detailed design of proposed scheme for real WSNs. Section 5 proves the correctness using BAN logic.