A Lightweight Cross-Layer Mutual Authentication With Key Agreement Protocol for IIoT

With constrained resources, the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) craves for lightweight and robust access authentication protocols to secure the network. Existing physical unclonable functions (PUFs)-based cryptographic protocols face privacy threats from wireless environments and semitrusted participants, while physical-layer authentication (PLA) is costly as a complementary protocol to upper layer. Therefore, in this article we propose a cross-layer mutual authentication with the key agreement protocol based on PUFs for IIoT. The proposed protocol integrates PUFs’ challenge-response pairs (CRPs) into low-complexity cryptographic primitives and signal phases of subcarriers, employs a newly designed authentication decision methodology, and achieves excellent authentication performance while reducing protocol redundancy. Our protocol also provides device anonymity, dynamic updates, and storage-free CRPs to defend against potential insider threats. The security of the proposed protocol has been formally and informally verified. The performance analysis results show that our protocol provides better security and privacy performance with low computation and communication cost. The simulation results show the protocol can obtain great authentication performance in the indoor factory (InF) wireless scenario of the 3GPP TR 38.901 standard.