The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) greatly facilitates industrial production and economic development. However, it has more vulnerabilities facing the security issues introduced by the openness of wireless communications. Hence, a lightweight combined physical layer encryption and authentication (PLEA) scheme is proposed in this paper to protect resource-constrained IIoT devices. In the proposed PLEA scheme, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation is adopted and the quadrant feature is extracted along with the shared key to generate a dynamic encrypting sequence and a tag. Then, physical layer encryption (PLE) and tag-embedding are carried out by phase reverse and power assignment according to the encrypting sequence and the tag, correspondingly. At the receiver, the same quadrant feature is extracted from the received signals and then is used to regenerate the tag and the decrypting sequence in order to execute physical layer authentication (PLA) and decryption. The error rates of the signal detection and tag detection are given, then the probability of detection and false alarm probability of the proposed PLA scheme are also obtained. In addition, the unified average changing intensity is defined and derived to analyze the performance of the PLE. Finally, computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme could provide effective security protection for IIoT.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) greatly facilitates industrial production and economic development. However, it has more vulnerabilities facing the security issues introduced by the openness of wireless communications. Hence, a lightweight combined physical layer encryption and authentication (PLEA) scheme is proposed in this paper to protect resource-constrained IIoT devices. In the proposed PLEA scheme, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation is adopted and the quadrant feature is extracted along with the shared key to generate a dynamic encrypting sequence and a tag. Then, physical layer encryption (PLE) and tag-embedding are carried out by phase reverse and power assignment according to the encrypting sequence and the tag, correspondingly. At the receiver, the same quadrant feature is extracted from the received signals and then is used to regenerate the tag and the decrypting sequence in order to execute physical layer authentication (PLA) and decryption. The error rates of the signal detection and tag detection are given, then the probability of detection and false alarm probability of the proposed PLA scheme are also obtained. In addition, the unified average changing intensity is defined and derived to analyze the performance of the PLE. Finally, computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme could provide effective security protection for IIoT.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a core enabler of Industry 4.0, is evolving rapidly to tackle the challenges imposed by explosive real-time manufacturing data in the context of Internet and telecommunication industry. 5G technology is the key to addressing such challenges. This is done by bypassing upper authentication protocols and supporting small data transmission during initial access, which, however, causes serious security breaches in IIoT device authentication. To solve this, in this article propose a secure cross-layer authentication framework based on quantum walk on circles. The system performs random hash coding on multidomain physical-layer resources to encode and decode device identifiers securely, while using a quantum walk based privacy-preserving protocol to maintain code privacy at arbitrary high level, being controlled by the number of occupied physical resources. The upper bound of decoding errors is derived and a nonconvex integer programming problem of minimizing the bound is formulated to characterize the security performance. The space of one-time keys for encryption is also derived that show how high privacy and scalability advantage is maintained against classical and quantum computers. Finally, we derive novel expressions of failure probability of this new authentication system and numerically show that our scheme can bring ultrahigh level of security and privacy protection with low latency despite attack.
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 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 security of the Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving considerable interest as the low power constraints and complexity features of many IoT devices are limiting the use of conventional cryptographic techniques. This article provides an overview of recent research efforts on alternative approaches for securing IoT wireless communications at the physical layer, specifically the key topics of key generation and physical layer encryption. These schemes can be implemented and are lightweight, and thus offer practical solutions for providing effective IoT wireless security. Future research to make IoT-based physical layer security more robust and pervasive is also covered.
Modern networking technologies involve the interconnection of smart and intelligent physical objects to provide advanced services. These physical objects may be part of various network technologies like WLAN, wireless sensor network (WSN), Internet of Things (IoT), etc., and share data in wireless mode, which should be secured from threats. These physical devices possess many constraints like power, computational complexity and storage, and are required to have lightweight security algorithms. Traditionally, security is achieved by the higher layers of the communication model, which has high computational complexity and consumes more power. In this chapter, a secure-key-generation scheme from physical layer characteristics is introduced as a possible lightweight security alternative to traditional upper-layer security approaches. The proposed scheme is based on the wiretap-channel model and security is achieved by generating keys at both communicating ends independently, based on inherent common-channel characteristics like randomness. It is mainly based on the principle of spatial decorrelation and channel reciprocity for identical carrier frequency. There is no provision for sharing keys as in public-key cryptography, so physical-layer key generation is not vulnerable to threats like key leakage. The generated key at the transmitter encrypts plain text; the generated cipher is transmitted on the common channel and is decrypted at the receiver end using the key generated by the receiver. Key generation consists of fundamental blocks like channel probing and quantization followed by information reconciliation and privacy amplification. The physical-layer key generation is already a power-efficient security solution; this chapter aims to enhance this capacity further. This is done by introducing low-end signal conditioning in the channel-probing step using moving-window averaging. This solution not only improves system performance but also makes it suitable for limited- power applications. The performance of the key-generation system is characterised in terms of the bit-disagreement rate between the generated key sequences of communicating parties and the key randomness by means of the NIST statistical test suite.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) integrates control systems with IoT technology to enable automation and intelligent operations in industrial environments. As IIoT deployments expand, reliance on wireless communication channels increases the attack surface and exposes systems to various security and privacy threats. Moreover, the limited computational capabilities of IIoT devices and the need to preserve device anonymity introduce additional security requirements. Insufficient protection against these challenges can result in operational disruption and significant economic losses. Existing symmetric-key and hash-based schemes are lightweight but lack scalability for large IIoT deployments, whereas public-key methods provide stronger security. However, the emergence of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of such protocols, as quantum algorithms can efficiently break conventional number-theoretic cryptosystems. To address these challenges, we propose a quantum-resistant three-party authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for the IIoT. The ring learning with errors (RLWE)-based protocol provides quantum-safe and efficient mutual authentication and secure session key establishment between workers and devices. Comprehensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol is robust against security attacks. Performance evaluations confirm lower computational and communication overhead than existing post-quantum schemes, proving its practicality for IIoT.