With the widespread utilization of Internet-enabled smart devices (SDs), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become prevalent in recent years. SDs exchange information through the open Internet, which creates security and privacy concerns for the exchanged information. To address these concerns, various solutions exist in the literature which, because of high computational and communication overheads, are not appropriate for the resource-constricted IIoT environment. This article proposes a resource-efficient authentication protocol for the IIoT, called REAP-IIoT, which employs a lightweight cryptography (LWC)-based authenticated encryption with associative data (AEAD) primitive AEGIS along with hash function. LWC-based AEAD primitives are suitable for resource constraint SDs because they require fewer computational resources. Moreover, REAP-IIoT renders the privacy-preserving user authentication functionality and establishes a session key (SK) between SDs deployed in the IIoT environment and users. Both user and SD utilize the established SK for encrypted communication. The security of SK, established during the authentication and key exchange (AKE) process of REAP-IIoT, is validated through the broadly accepted random or real model. Besides, Scyther-based security verification is conducted to illustrate that REAP-IIoT is secure and can protect the man-in-the-middle and replay attacks. Additionally, the informal security analysis is carried out to show that REAP-IIoT is protected against various covert security risks. A thorough comparison reveals that REAP-IIoT renders enhanced security characteristics apart from its low communication, storage, and computational overheads than the relevant AKE protocols.
With the widespread utilization of Internet-enabled smart devices (SDs), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become prevalent in recent years. SDs exchange information through the open Internet, which creates security and privacy concerns for the exchanged information. To address these concerns, various solutions exist in the literature which, because of high computational and communication overheads, are not appropriate for the resource-constricted IIoT environment. This article proposes a resource-efficient authentication protocol for the IIoT, called REAP-IIoT, which employs a lightweight cryptography (LWC)-based authenticated encryption with associative data (AEAD) primitive AEGIS along with hash function. LWC-based AEAD primitives are suitable for resource constraint SDs because they require fewer computational resources. Moreover, REAP-IIoT renders the privacy-preserving user authentication functionality and establishes a session key (SK) between SDs deployed in the IIoT environment and users. Both user and SD utilize the established SK for encrypted communication. The security of SK, established during the authentication and key exchange (AKE) process of REAP-IIoT, is validated through the broadly accepted random or real model. Besides, Scyther-based security verification is conducted to illustrate that REAP-IIoT is secure and can protect the man-in-the-middle and replay attacks. Additionally, the informal security analysis is carried out to show that REAP-IIoT is protected against various covert security risks. A thorough comparison reveals that REAP-IIoT renders enhanced security characteristics apart from its low communication, storage, and computational overheads than the relevant AKE protocols.
The ever-evolving Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in a new era of intelligent manufacturing across multiple industries. However, the security and privacy of real-time data transmitted over the public channel of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) remain formidable challenges. Existing lightweight protocols often omit one or more critical security features, such as anonymity and untraceability, and are susceptible to threats like desynchronization attacks. Additionally, they struggle to achieve an optimal balance between robust security and performance efficiency. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a new lightweight key agreement security scheme that guarantees secure access to the IIoT-enabled flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The strength of our scheme lies in its utilization of the authenticated encryption with associative data (AEAD) primitive, AEGIS, along with hash functions and physical unclonable functions, which secure the IIoT ecosystem. Additionally, our scheme offers flexibility in the form of the addition of new machines, password updates, and revocation in cases of theft or loss. A comprehensive security analysis demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme in thwarting various attacks. The formal analysis, based on the Real-or-Random (RoR) model, ensures session key indistinguishability, while the informal analysis highlights its resilience against known attacks. The comparative assessment demonstrates that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms the benchmark schemes across multiple dimensions, including security and functionality features, computational and communication overheads, and runtime efficiency. Specifically, the proposed scheme achieves peak performance enhancements of 77.55%, 44.73%, and 69.6% in computational overhead, runtime overhead, and communication overhead, respectively, underscoring its substantial performance advantages.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has a wide range of applications that influence the life of people expeditiously. In recent years, IoT becomes an emerging technology in a number of fields. Different devices with divergent functionality are applied in IoT to work in several domains. These domains include smart home, smart farming, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Among these territories, the IIoT obtains more attention. In an IIoT environment, a legitimate user can control and access devices remotely. Legitimate users can access real-time data and share confidential information. The information is transmitted via public communication channel, which can be vulnerable to security attacks. In this article, we present a provably secure multifactor authenticated key agreement scheme to offer security regarding transmission of data in IIoT environment. This scheme will support the legitimate user to remotely access the sensing devices. Our presented scheme uses only symmetric cryptographic, bitwise XOR operation, and hash function to be resource-constrained. Our scheme is found to be resource efficient through communication and computation analysis. The performance analysis illustrates that the cost of computation and communication of our scheme is comparatively low as compared to other relevant schemes. The formal and informal security analysis proved that our scheme is secure and efficient as it can withstand several known adversarial attacks. We have used some cryptographic operations like XOR and hashing to provide security and privacy to legitimate entities.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enables smart manufacturing through advanced sensing, monitoring, and control capabilities. However, securing these resource-constrained IIoT devices poses critical challenges due to limited memory and energy resources, while the emergence of quantum computing threatens existing security mechanisms. This study addresses the urgent need for practical quantum-resistant security solutions for deployment in resource-limited industrial environments. It presents QLight-IIoT, a quantum-resistant authentication and key agreement (AKA) scheme established solely on hash-based hardness assumption, demonstrating that lightweight quantum-resistant authentication is achievable without relying on computationally intensive primitives like lattices or codes. The proposed scheme is deployed and tested over Raspberry Pi 4 to demonstrate its practicality in real-world IIoT environments. Experimental validation shows that the scheme ensures mutual authentication with session key establishment with an average key generation time of 0.3200 seconds. The security of the proposed QLight-IIoT scheme is systematically evaluated using the Real-or-Random (ROR) model, the Scyther tool, and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) framework. Performance evaluation reveals significant efficiency improvements, achieving 9.29–77.36% reduction in communication cost and 4.41–95.37% reduction in Computational overhead relative to existing schemes. The scheme requires minimal storage of 632 bits per IIoT device, resulting in up to 64.84% reduction in total system storage cost. Comparative security analysis further validates the scheme’s security against various attack vectors. This work provides a practical pathway for industrial organizations to prepare IIoT infrastructure for quantum-resistant security challenges while maintaining compatibility with current resource-constrained hardware.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the industrial field. IIoT allows users to remotely access industrial equipment and the data in it, which also brings certain challenges to the security of industrial data. Authentication and key agreement protocols are very effective security technologies in the matter of protecting industrial data. There is a large amount of research work on authentication protocols in IIoT, but most of the protocols have security weaknesses. Recently, Rafique et al. proposed a multi-factor protocol in IIoT that can accomplish authentication and session key establishment through a gateway. Rafique et al. claimed that their protocol is secure, unfortunately, we carefully analyze the protocol of Rafique et al. and find some security flaws, i.e., it is vulnerable to insider attack and known session-specific temporary information (KSSTI) attack, and unable to provide forward security. We explore the factors of insecurity and propose an enhanced multi-factor secure authentication and key agreement protocol in IIoT. The new protocol improves the security of the protocol while using only symmetric cryptography, hash function, and XOR operation. Formal security analysis and informal security discussions demonstrate that the new protocol is resistant to a variety of known attacks. After performance analysis, our protocol has lower computational cost, and increases no significant communication cost, while providing more secure and robust properties.
Continuous development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has opened up enormous opportunities for the engineers to enhance the efficiency of the machines. Despite the development, many industry administrators still fear to use Internet for operating their machines due to untrusted nature of the communication channel. The utilization of internet for managing industrial operations can be widespread adopted if the authentication of the entities are performed and trust is ensured. The traditional schemes with their inherent security issues and other complexities, cannot be directly deployed to resource constrained network devices. Therefore, we have proposed a strong mutual authentication and secret key exchange protocol to address the vulnerabilities of the existing schemes. We have used various cryptography operations such as hashing, ciphering, and so forth, for providing secure mutual authentication and secret key exchange between different entities to restrict unauthorized access. Performance and security analysis clearly demonstrates that the proposed work is energy efficient (computation and communication inexpensive) and more robust against the attacks in comparison to the traditional schemes.
The phenomenal growth of smartphones and wearable devices has begun crowd-sourcing applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). E-healthcare is considered the essential service for crowd-sourcing IoT applications that help remote access or storage medical server (MS) data to the authorized doctors, patients, nurses, etc., via the public Internet. As the public Internet is exposed to various security attacks, remote user authenticated key exchange (AKE) has become a pressing need for the secure and reliable use of these services. This paper proposes a new resource-efficient AKE scheme for telecare medical information systems, called REAS-TMIS. It uses authenticated encryption with associative data (AEAD) and a hash function. AEAD schemes are devised specifically for encrypted communication among resource-constricted IoT devices. These features of AEAD make REAS-TMIS resource-efficient. Moreover, REAS-TMIS dispenses with the elliptic curve point multiplication and chaotic map that are computationally expensive operations. In addition, REAS-TMIS renders the functionality of session key (SK) establishment for future encrypted communication between MS and users after validating the authenticity of the user. The security of SK is corroborated employing the well establish random oracle model. Moreover, Scyther-based security corroboration is implemented to show that REAS-TMIS is secure, and informal security analysis is executed to show the resiliency of REAS-TMIS against various security attacks. Besides, a thorough analysis shows that REAS-TMIS, while accomplishing the authentication phase, requires less computational, communication, and storage resources than the related authentication protocol.