An Authenticated Group Shared Key Mechanism Based on a Combiner for Hash Functions over the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides internet connectivity for instruments, digital machines, and any other manufactured object to enable intelligent industrial operations to achieve high productivity. Securing communications between IIoT devices remains a critical and challenging issue due to the resource-constrained and processing capabilities of sensing devices. Moreover, the traditional group shared key might implement complex mathematical operations that are not suitable for the limited recourse capability of the IIoT device. Furthermore, the standard Diffie–Hellman (DH) and elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH), which are the most suited for tiny devices, only work between a pair of IIoT devices, while they are not designed to work among a group of IIoT devices. This paper proposes an authenticated group shared key (AGSK) mechanism that allows a set of industrial objects to establish a common session key over the IIoT. The proposed AGSK utilizes the combiner for the hash function and digital signature, which is implemented in IIoT devices. Additionally, the random oracle model has been used to prove the security of AGSK, while the IIoT adversary model has been used to analyze the AGSK countermeasures against cyberattacks. The results of the performance evaluation showed that the efficiency of the AGSK was reduced by 41.3% for CPU computation time, 45.7% for storage cost, and 40% less power consumption compared to the baseline group key management algorithms.

Exploring Authentication Paradigms in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Scoping Review

“…Healthcare: In the convergence of privacy and security within healthcare ecosystems, research papers [12,[34][35][36][37][38][39], make substantial contributions, comprising 11% of notable Industrial: This sector, represented by research papers [7,9,17,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33], accounts for 15% of the total. The central focus revolves around the crucial requirement for authorization frameworks in industrial settings to counter unauthorized access, strengthen data security, and guarantee the unwavering reliability and safety of critical industrial processes.…”

“…Others were motivated to have the authentication process in IoT integrated into another practical, real-world system or hardware (such as pollution detection systems [39], digital health solutions [11,35,48], medical devices [34,37], automated monitoring systems [49,54], intelligent transport systems [49], multiple integrated access control systems [32], and the vulnerability of servers in cyber-physical systems [75,76]. Some emerging problems involve addressing cross-domain authentication in IoT devices [12,42,69,70], multi-layered architecture communication [8,69], resource-friendly security mechanisms [36,58,64], and Internet-enabled smart devices [9,27,60].…”

“…In the rapidly evolving landscape of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) authentication, a synthesis of noteworthy trends has materialized, reflecting a collaborative effort to bolster security, privacy, and efficiency. Embracing lightweight cryptography, Tanveer pioneers' solutions address privacy concerns and computational constraints, facilitating secure communication in the IIoT [7,27]. The subsequent REAP-IIoT protocol introduces resource-efficient and privacy-preserving authentication.…”

“…The second most adopted performance metric was the communication cost (or communication overhead), which encompasses the overhead associated with the communication process that transmits security parameters between interacting entities [7,10,12,40,43,44,47,65], such as the size of the network bandwidth [39], data transmis-sion amount [36,51,64,67,69,76] or transmission delays [52], network latency [28,42,69,75], key exchange protocols [27], and cryptographic processes associated with it [32,38,50]. Meanwhile, time consumption involves key performance that involves the average execution time of critical steps in the information sharing protocol (such as sharing processing, reputation value computation, and voting mechanism) [6] or execution protocol [31,53], period of physical presence such as on time on air [39] or alive time that crucial for network longevity [52,61], the response time for signature, verification, execution, or analysis time of associated encryption or decryption processes [11,30,34,[43][44][45]60,73,79,80], certificate validation time [58]...…”

A Survey on Key Agreement and Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things Application

“…The users in the same group can encrypt and decrypt messages using the shared key so that they can communicate with each other securely [29], [29]. There are two steps in generating a group shared key: distributing the pre-shared key and generating the final key [30]. To enable users to switch to different groups, the dynamic joining and leaving processes can reduce the cost of the authentication process [31], [32].…”