In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, integrating blockchain with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) presents a groundbreaking synergy with transformative potential. This paper addresses key security challenges in IIoT environments by proposing a novel authentication mechanism for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems that enhances security by integrating Quantum-Elliptic Curve Cryptography (QECC) and a blockchain-regulated, automatic key refreshment mechanism. Building on the ECC-based Diffie-Hellman protocol, our approach addresses vulnerabilities such as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks by combining quantum cryptography with ECC to detect eavesdroppers and secure communications between Base Stations (BS), Relay Stations (RS), and Subscriber Stations (SS). The blockchain-regulated mechanism ensures periodic and verifiable key updates, enhancing key management against MAC layer and spoofing attacks. This integrated framework significantly improves the security of IIoT systems by ensuring confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and non-repudiation, offering a robust solution for secure data transmission in IIoT environments.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, integrating blockchain with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) presents a groundbreaking synergy with transformative potential. This paper addresses key security challenges in IIoT environments by proposing a novel authentication mechanism for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems that enhances security by integrating Quantum-Elliptic Curve Cryptography (QECC) and a blockchain-regulated, automatic key refreshment mechanism. Building on the ECC-based Diffie-Hellman protocol, our approach addresses vulnerabilities such as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks by combining quantum cryptography with ECC to detect eavesdroppers and secure communications between Base Stations (BS), Relay Stations (RS), and Subscriber Stations (SS). The blockchain-regulated mechanism ensures periodic and verifiable key updates, enhancing key management against MAC layer and spoofing attacks. This integrated framework significantly improves the security of IIoT systems by ensuring confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and non-repudiation, offering a robust solution for secure data transmission in IIoT environments.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) aims at improving the manufacturing cost and quality by inter-connection of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices. In the 4IR, IIoT-based machines need to collaborate securely and autonomously through the insecure Internet channel. Although various blockchain-based protocols have been introduced for securing cross-industry Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, they, are insecure to some cyberattacks, rely on some intermediary servers for successful M2M authentication, are not efficient enough to be employed in the context of IIoT environments, and are not resilient to quantum computers. To address these weaknesses, this paper suggests a novel quantum-resilient self-certified authentication protocol for cross-industry communications using the cutting-edge blockchain technology. Thanks to the blockchain ledger, the cross-industry connections have been facilitated and thanks to the self-certified approach, the blockchain referrals have been reduced to only one ledger reading. In our protocol, no intermediary server needs to involve and IIoT machines can directly authenticate each other. The advantages and efficiency enhancements of our protocol, compared to top-related ones, are shown, respectively, by comparative property and performance analyses. Specifically, our protocol indicates 13% and 91% improvements in communication and computation overheads over the most efficient protocol.
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected billions of smart devices across healthcare, transportation, industrial automation, and smart home environments. While IoT has enhanced automation and data-driven decision-making, its widespread deployment has also increased the risk of cyberattacks. Conventional public-key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks, particularly those based on Shor's algorithm. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Framework (QRCF) for secure IoT communication using lattice-based cryptography integrated with lightweight authentication and efficient key management. The framework is designed to meet the computational limitations of IoT devices while ensuring long-term confidentiality and integrity. Performance evaluation demonstrates improvements in security resilience, authentication efficiency, and communication reliability compared with traditional cryptographic approaches. The proposed framework offers a scalable and future-ready solution for protecting IoT ecosystems in the post-quantum era.
The explosive growth of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies has been reshaping manufacturing, energy, transportation and infrastructure with real-time monitoring and automation supported by predictive analytics. The more interconnected machines are, the more vulnerable they become to advanced cyberattacks. RSA and ECC are two of the dominant cryptographic algorithms that 60% of the IIoT communications today. They are still susceptible to quantum computing attacks, especially from Shor, which can easily break public-key encryption. This new risk, and the threat it represents, calls for a monitoring of the quantum situation by adding Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to guarantee data privacy and resilient systems. This work studies the quantum-empowered security approach to IIoT environment and considers lattice-based, hash-based and code-based cryptography techniques immune to quantum attacks. This paper investigates the industrial system design demands, identifies some of these weaknesses, and presents a secure communication architecture including post-quantum cryptography for device authentication, secure firmware updates and data encryption. Studies show that due to constraints in resources, triage for IIoT devices is difficult, especially because of limitations of processors, among others; latency and scalability are two issues. The approach proposed showcases a means for industrial cybersecurity to benefit from post-quantum cryptography without losing efficiency.
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 convergence of 6G communication technologies and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has revolutionized modern healthcare by enabling real-time monitoring, intelligent diagnosis, and remote patient management. However, the proliferation of interconnected medical devices also exposes the ecosystem to severe security challenges, including identity forgery, data tampering, and emerging quantum-based attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-assisted quantum signature framework for securing data exchange in 6G - enabled IoMT environments. The proposed framework leverages quantum digital signatures (QDS) based on entangled photon states to ensure message authenticity and non-repudiation, while blockchain technology provides decentralized trust management and immutable transaction logging. A Medical Authorization Center (MAC) coordinates identity registration, signature verification, and consensus-based access control among IoMT entities. Furthermore, smart contracts are utilized to automate trust evaluation and audit trails, thereby mitigating insider and replay attacks. Performance analysis using Qiskit simulations and IBM’s quantum backends demonstrates an average signature fidelity of 91% and a communication efficiency of 75.61%, validating the framework’s robustness for resource-constrained medical devices. By fusing quantum communication primitives with blockchain-enabled transparency, this work presents a scalable and tamper-resistant security solution for next-generation healthcare networks. The convergence of 6G communication technologies and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has revolutionized modern healthcare by enabling real-time monitoring, intelligent diagnosis, and remote patient management. However, the proliferation of interconnected medical devices also exposes the ecosystem to severe security challenges, including identity forgery, data tampering, and emerging quantum-based attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-assisted quantum signature framework for securing data exchange in 6G-enabled IoMT environments. The proposed framework leverages quantum digital signatures (QDS) based on entangled photon states to ensure message authenticity and non-repudiation, while blockchain technology provides decentralized trust management and immutable transaction logging. A Medical Authorization Center (MAC) coordinates identity registration, signature verification, and consensus-based access control among IoMT entities. Furthermore, smart contracts are utilized to automate trust evaluation and audit trails, thereby mitigating insider and replay attacks. Performance analysis using Qiskit simulations and IBM’s quantum backends demonstrates an average signature fidelity of 91% and a communication efficiency of 75.61%, validating the framework’s robustness for resource-constrained medical devices. By fusing quantum communication primitives with blockchain-enabled transparency, this work presents a scalable and tamper-resistant security solution for next-generation healthcare networks.
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has introduced significant security challenges due to resource-constrained devices, heterogeneous network architectures, and largescale connectivity. Traditional authentication and key exchange mechanisms, primarily based on classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. The emergence of quantum algorithms, particularly Shor’s algorithm, threatens the long-term confidentiality and integrity of IoT communications. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol specifically designed for secure IoT architectures. The proposed framework integrates post-quantum cryptographic primitives, including lattice-based key exchange mechanisms and hash-based authentication schemes, optimized for low computational overhead suitable for constrained IoT devices. The protocol ensures mutual authentication, forward secrecy, and resistance against quantum adversaries while maintaining minimal communication latency. Security analysis demonstrates robustness against replay, man-in-the-middle, and key-compromise attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed solution achieves a balance between quantum security strength and resource efficiency, making it suitable for next-generation IoT deployments in smart cities, healthcare systems, and industrial automation.