A Lightweight Authentication Mechanism for M2M Communications in Industrial IoT Environment

Abstract

Abstract-In the emerging Industrial IoT era, Machine-toMachine (M2M) communication technology is considered as a key underlying technology for building Industrial IoT environments where devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, gateways) are enabled to exchange information with each other in an autonomous way without human intervention. However, most of the existing M2M protocols that can be also used in the Industrial IoT domain provide security mechanisms based on asymmetric cryptography resulting in high computational cost. As a consequence, the resource-constrained IoT devices are not able to support them appropriately and thus, many security issues arise for the Industrial IoT environment. Therefore, lightweight security mechanisms are required for M2M communications in Industrial IoT in order to reach its full potential. As a step towards this direction, in this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication mechanism, based only on hash and XOR operations, for M2M communications in Industrial IoT environment. The proposed mechanism is characterized by low computational cost, communication and storage overhead, while achieving mutual authentication, session key agreement, device's identity confidentiality, and resistance against the following attacks: replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, and modification attack.

Lightweight Authentication Protocol for M2M Communications of Resource-Constrained Devices in Industrial Internet of Things

“…The execution-cost of LAKD protocol is presented in Table 5, together with that of protocols [22,[60][61][62][63], which were also designed for M2M communication. Concerning the Case 1 measurement, the proposal has less execution-time than the other protocols, except for the schemes of Esfahani et al [22] and Joshitta et al [63]. The cost difference between LAKD and Esfahani et al is of just one more hash execution in the sensor node in LAKD, and for Joshitta et al the difference is of 48.07% less cost in the medical device compared to the sensor node of LAKD, and 23.07% less in the authentication server compared with the gateway of LAKD.…”

“…Consequently, attacks in the digital world will have an effect on the physical world and they can affect any part of our daily life. Furthermore, toward ubiquity, many IIoT devices are manufactured as tiny resource-constrained devices, the lifespan of machines on the production floor is of several decades, and it is not always economically possible to replace all legacy machinery with the latest technology [22]. Therefore, security services must also be considered for legacy resource-constrained devices, to prevent adversaries exploit them as the weakest link of the IIoT system.…”

“…The computing requirements and security of LAKD were compared with lightweight schemes, resulting in the proposal having a good execution-time and communication-cost for IIoT, and higher security. The protocol was inspired by the work in [22], wherein an authentication protocol for M2M communication in IIoT was proposed. That only uses the operations xor and hash function; thus, it is very lightweight.…”

WoT Communication Protocol Security and Privacy Issues

“…The scholar mainly discussed the security of devices as the main part of that area and considered the layer as secure which is similar to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol that consists of security systems and techniques for the IoT networks [15]. Another scholar has proposed a solution for confidentiality as the main feature [16] which deals with devices have less processing power should use asymmetric cryptographic algorithms for the authentication process. And this process requires less processing power for this new method of authentication which is based on the function of hashing or OR operations.…”

MQTT Security: A Novel Fuzzing Approach

“…In these cases, the authors focus on the security of this type of device as part of a broader spectrum, treating the layers of protection that can wrap around the TCP/IP protocol and the security architectures and models that best fit IoT networks [17]. In addition to confidentiality, other security features have been addressed; [18] deals with the problem that smart devices have when they do not have enough processing capacity to use asymmetric encryption algorithms to perform authentication tasks, and it proposes a new authentication approach based on operations that consume few resources, such as hash functions or OR operations. Some other interesting approaches focus on how to force compliance with the optional security features that the MQTT protocol can implement.…”