CAKE-PUF: A Collaborative Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol Based on Physically Unclonable Functions for Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is widely used in smart factories, enabling smart manufacturing and improving productivity. Although the application of IIoT has significantly altered a number of industries, increased connectivity has also given rise to security concerns. For example, information is collected from different domains in smart industrial environments and transmitted through public IoT channels. However, this phase can lead to communication security and privacy leakage issues when applied to resource-constrained smart industrial devices. This work proposes a novel collaborative authentication and key exchange protocol based on physically unclonable functions (PUFs) to enable safe and efficient communication amongst smart industrial devices in an IIoT context. The proposed protocol uses PUF to enhance the security of smart industrial devices. Additionally, to mitigate difficult situations, such as device loss, the proposed protocol combines an elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme to achieve forward security and collaborative authentication between the domain server and smart industrial devices during the key exchange phase. We analyze and provide security proofs for the proposed protocol. Furthermore, performance analysis is conducted to evaluate the computational costs of the protocol. The results of this work contribute to the development of secure and reliable authentication and key exchange protocols within the context of IIoT, promoting the adoption of IIoT technology in smart factories while reducing potential security threats.