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IEEE Internet of Things Journal

An Enhanced Multifactor Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol in Industrial Internet of Things

Yiran Han, Hua Guo, Jianwei Liu, Brou Bernard Ehui, Yapeng Wu, Sijia Li

Published Feb 12, 2024• 54 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/jiot.2024.3355228

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•Feb 9, 2026•0 citations
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.
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) 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.
Internet of Things brings convenience to the social life, at the same time, putting forward higher requirements for the security of data transmission and storage. Security incidents based on industrial Internet of Things have occurred frequently recently, which should be given full consideration. The identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol can solve these security threats to a certain extent. Recently, a lightweight identity-based authenticated key agreement protocol for Industrial Internet of Things, called ID-2PAKA protocol, was claimed to achieve secure authentication and meet security properties. In this paper, we show that the ID-2PAKA protocol is insecure in identity authentication and cannot resisting ephemeral key compromise impersonation attack.
Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) is the basis of Industry 4.0, which extends Internet connectivity beyond traditional computing devices like computers and smartphones to the physical world for improving efficiency and accuracy while reducing the production cost. However, there are tremendous security threats to IIoT, such as IIoT device hijacking and data leaks. Therefore, a lightweight authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol is commonly applied to establish a session key for securing the communication between IIoT devices. To protect the previous session keys from being compromised, perfect forward secrecy (PFS) has been one of the most important security properties of AKA. In this article, we present an efficient PFS-enabled AKA protocol for IIoT systems, which is developed based on a new dynamic authentication credential (DAC) framework, without using any public-key cryptographic primitives. It is worth noting that our protocol is also faster than the state-of-the-art DAC-based AKA protocols with PFS. Moreover, we give the formal security result of the proposed protocol in the random oracle model.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is among the most promising technologies of the future, and its development has garnered attention worldwide. However, the rise of the IoT has been accompanied by a proportionate increase in security concerns regarding communication between IoT entities. Recently, Alzahrani et al. proposed an identity-based authentication and key agreement protocol for an IoT environment, wherein a physically unclonable function was employed. They claimed that their protocol can resist various types of attacks; however, after thorough analysis, we determined it to be ineffective against privileged internal attacks, physical IoT device capture attacks, stolen-verifier attacks, and known temporary information exposure attacks. To resolve these security weaknesses, we propose a new authentication and key agreement protocol. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed protocol is provably secure in real-or-random (ROR) model and Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic, resisting known attacks while incurring low communication and computation costs.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the expansion and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in various industrial settings. Despite the numerous applications of the Industrial Internet of Things and its numerous advantages, the security of data exchanged in the Industrial Internet of Things remains one of the challenges facing this emerging technology. When this data is accessed and manipulated by attackers, the consequences may include disruptions to production processes, financial losses, and even threats to human life. Therefore, given the demand not only to protect information but also to ensure the health and safety of industries, the utmost attention should be paid to the security of data and entities involved in the Industrial Internet of Things. In this paper, an innovative protocol for authentication and key agreement between Industrial Internet of Things devices and cloud servers is proposed. This protocol is designed to deal with security threats and meet various security requirements. The Scyther tool has been used to evaluate the performance and security of the proposed scheme. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol effectively maintains all security aspects and outperforms similar schemes in terms of efficiency.