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IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Lightweight and Robust Key Agreement for Securing IIoT-Driven Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Muhammad Hammad, Akhtar A. Badshah, Mohammed A. Almeer, Muhammad Mohsin Waqas, Houbing Herbert Song, Sheng Chen, Zhu Han

Published Jan 28, 2025• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/jiot.2025.3535846

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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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.