A lightweight authentication mechanism for M2M communications in industrial IoT environment

In the emerging Industrial IoT era, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication technology is considered as a key underlying technology for building Industrial IoT environments where devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, gateways) are enabled to exchange information with each other in an autonomous way without human intervention. However, most of the existing M2M protocols that can be also used in the Industrial IoT domain provide security mechanisms based on asymmetric cryptography resulting in high computational cost. As a consequence, the resource-constrained IoT devices are not able to support them appropriately and thus, many security issues arise for the Industrial IoT environment. Therefore, lightweight security mechanisms are required for M2M communications in Industrial IoT in order to reach its full potential. As a step towards this direction, in this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication mechanism, based only on hash and XOR operations, for M2M communications in Industrial IoT environment. The proposed mechanism is characterized by low computational cost, communication and storage overhead, while achieving mutual authentication, session key agreement, device’s identity confidentiality, and resistance against the following attacks: replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, impersonation attack, and modification attack

Authentication Solutions in Industrial Internet of Things: A Survey

With the rapid growth of industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is considered to be a promising solution for converting normal operations to ‘smart’ operations in industrial sectors and systems. The well-known characteristics of IIoT has greatly improved the productivity and quality of many industrial sectors. IIoT allows the connectivity of many industrial smart devices such as, sensors, actuators and gateways. The connectivity feature makes this critical environment vulnerable to various cybersecurity attacks. Subsequently, maintaining the security of IIoT sys-tems remains a challenge to ensure their success. In particular, authenticating the connected IIoT devices is a must to ensure that they can be trusted and prevent any malicious attempts. Hence, the objective of this survey is to overview, discuss and analyze the different solutions related to de-vice authentication in the domain of IIoT. Also, we analyze the IIoT environment in terms of characteristics, architecture and security requirements. Similarly, we highlight the role of (machine-to-machine) M2M communication in IIoT. We further contribute to this survey by outlining several open issues that must be considered when designing authentication schemes for IIoT. Fi-nally, we highlight a number of research directions and open challenges

Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

Security of IoT in 5G Cellular Networks: A Review of Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a global network that integrates real life physical objects with the virtual world through the Internet for making intelligent decisions. In a pervasive computing environment, thousands of smart devices, that are constrained in storage, battery backup and computational capability, are connected with each other. In such an environment, cellular networks that are evolving from 4G to 5G, are set to play a crucial role. Distinctive features like high bandwidth, wider coverage, easy connectivity, in-built billing mechanism, interface for M2M communication, etc., makes 5G cellular network a perfect candidate to be adopted as a backbone network for the future IoT. However, due to resource constrained nature of the IoT devices, researchers have anticipated several security and privacy issues in IoT deployments over 5G cellular network. Off late, several schemes and protocols have been proposed to handle these issues. This paper performs a comprehensive review of such schemes and protocols proposed in recent times. Different open security issues, challenges and future research direction are also summarized in this review paper

Security for the Industrial IoT: The Case for Information-Centric Networking

Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner. In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model, as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.Comment: To be published at IEEE WF-IoT 201