Asymmetric Group Key Agreement Protocol Based on Blockchain and Attribute for Industrial Internet of Things

In the era of Industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been applied to help physical entities to access real-time data in the network and share critical information. However, both the decentralization of IIoT and the heterogeneity of different devices constituting IIoT also pose a serious threat to secure communication between entities. Although the encryption technologies can ensure the confidentiality of communication data, the security of key becomes more important for devices in IIoT. Recently, some asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols have been proposed to negotiate a common encryption key for group members, and each group member holds its decryption key. However, the existing AGKA protocols fail to effectively control the access of agreement participants in IIoT. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose an AGKA protocol based on blockchain and attribute for IIoT. The proposed protocol not only realizes the access control of agreement participants but also realizes the automation of access control, the tamper resistance, and the nonrepudiation of the agreement process. The security and performance analysis of the proposed protocol show that it is more secure and effective compared with the existing AGKA protocols.