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