Proposing Context-Aware Authentication for the Industrial Internet of Things

The IoT is experiencing massive growth in the industrial sector. This growth requires the development of innovative security concepts to keep up with the changing requirements of industrial IoT systems and applications. One important area of such M2M communication, where appropriate security measures need to be developed, is the authentication between devices. This paper proposes context-awareness as a method to enhance the authentication process in the industrial IoT. First, the problems of industrial IoT authentication are analyzed and the consequential requirements are formulated. Then it is shown, how context-awareness can help to overcome those problems. The advantages, which context-aware authentication brings, are afterwards demonstrated with concrete use cases.