Journal of Software Engineering1819-43112152-0941Asian Network for Scientific Information10.3923/jse.2014.184.193YangQinghua WangLiejun LiuQi WangMingwei 3201483Authentication is a very significant demand in wireless sensor networks, especially in some critical applications. However, most previous user authentication schemes are always vulnerable and high-power consumption for the resource-constrained WSNs nodes. This study will focus on user authentication by investigating the Park and others schemes to identify their demerits. After that, a novel and lightweight mutual user authentication protocol named MUAP is proposed. The analysis and results show that the proposed scheme not only can resist the specific attacks likes Man-In-The-Middle Attack, Impersonation Attack and Message-Alteration Attack but also is better than Kumar and others protocols in terms of devices computation overhead and communication consumption.]]>Aldosary, S. and G. Howells,20122012pp: 6669Chen, T.H. and W.K. Shih,201032704712Coron, J.S., E. Prouff and T. Roche,20132013pp: 77-90pp: 77-90Das, A.K.,20114162180Das, M.L.,2009810861090Dolev, S., M. Kopeetsky and A. Shamir,201148132149He, D., Y. Gao, S. Chan, C. Chen and J. Bu,201010361371Khan, M.K. and K. Alghathbar,20101024502459Ko, L.C.,20082008pp: 608612Kumar, P., A. Gurtov, M. Ylianttila, S.G Lee and H. Lee,201335889899Lee, T.H.,20082008pp: 657660Liu, Z., L. Zhang, J. Jing and W. Pan,20102010Sekar, G.,20122012pp: 269-288pp: 269-288Sun, T., X.J. Yan and Y. Yan,2013823662373Ulutas, M., G. Ulutas and V.V. Nabiyev,201184341353Yoo, S.G., K.Y. Park and J. Kim,20122012Yoon, E.J. and K.Y. Yoo,20112011pp: 392396Zhou, C., X. Feng and D. Lin,20112011pp: 4053Moteiv Corporation,20122012Crossbow Technology,20122012