A Lightweight Authentication via Unclonable Functions for Industrial Internet-of-Things

In industrial internet-of-things (IIoT), sensors, communication networks, and objects interact to exchange massive data volumes at low latency. As IIoT-driven sensor networks support a range of diverse verticals like automobiles, smart farming, logistics, large organization and autonomous networks communicate over open channels. Thus, security and privacy of data is of prime concern. However, IIoT channels are faced with challenge of lightweight communication, due to limited resources, power and memory. Thus, the conflicting requirements of measurable security and lightweight resource management is an open gap. The race is towards the build of lightweight security process, at low latency, power, and communication costs. To address the gap, this paper addresses the issue of security and resource management scheme that proposes a lightweight authentication based on simple one-way hash and exclusive-OR (XOR) operations that reduces the operational costs. The scheme is compared against recent lightweight authentication protocols in terms of validation, energy dissipation, and computation costs. The obtained results indicate the efficacy of the framework against conventional approaches.