RAT Ring: Event Driven Publish/Subscribe Communication Protocol for IIoT by Report and Traceable Ring Signature

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been widely studied, which dramatically enhanced the manufacturing efficiency and service elasticity. However, how to ensure the data confidentiality and security in the event-driven publish/subscribe communication model becomes a cumbersome problem. To address this concern, ring signatures have been researched deeply. Nevertheless, existing solutions have large computational burdens and neglect to incorporate reporting and tracing features, which makes it impractical for IIoT. In this way, research focus on designing an efficient report and traceable ring signature is still far-reaching. In this article, we propose RAT ring, a novel report and traceable ring signature, which provides publisher authentication, anonymous communication, reporting, and tracing. To achieve this, we adopt the zero knowledge proof to verify the authenticity of publisher data, and the signature of knowledge to trace the signature. Then, we formalize and prove the security of our scheme. Eventually, through comprehensive performance evaluation, our scheme outperforms prior works by approximately up to 51 times in terms of total computational overhead. These results demonstrate that our design is practical and effective for data privacy-preserving in IIoT.