An Efficient Authentication Scheme for Secure Communication between Industrial IoT Devices

With the advent of Industry 4.0 era, the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been recognized as a promising solution to transform the conventional operations into smart operations in the industrial systems such as manufacturing, supply chain, transportation, and healthcare. The intelligent industrial operations largely count on information collection through various sensors and analysis of the gathered information, for remote operation and control of the processes in real time through the Internet. However, secure collection of data from the sensors is of utmost importance for the realization of the usefulness of such system. Researchers have suggested authentication schemes for secure communication between resource constrained IIoT devices. However, the existing works fail to provide adequate security and privacy, and incur high computation, communication and storage overheads. Therefore, there is the need of a lightweight and secure communication mechanism in order to reach the full potential of IIoT systems. To this end, we propose an efficient authentication scheme for establishing secure communication between IIoT devices, with reduced resource requirements. The proposed scheme provides device's untraceability, unlinkability and resistance to impersonation attack, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, information leakage attack via the communication channel and session key disclosure attack. The proposed scheme is verified for correctness using BAN (Burrows-Abadi-Needham) Logic. The scheme is simulated using AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool for security verification. Finally, performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art authentication schemes in terms of computation, communication, storage overheads and security.