Make-it—a lightweight mutual authentication and key exchange protocol for industrial internet of things

Abstract

Continuous development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has opened up enormous opportunities for the engineers to enhance the efficiency of the machines. Despite the development, many industry administrators still fear to use Internet for operating their machines due to untrusted nature of the communication channel. The utilization of internet for managing industrial operations can be widespread adopted if the authentication of the entities are performed and trust is ensured. The traditional schemes with their inherent security issues and other complexities, cannot be directly deployed to resource constrained network devices. Therefore, we have proposed a strong mutual authentication and secret key exchange protocol to address the vulnerabilities of the existing schemes. We have used various cryptography operations such as hashing, ciphering, and so forth, for providing secure mutual authentication and secret key exchange between different entities to restrict unauthorized access. Performance and security analysis clearly demonstrates that the proposed work is energy efficient (computation and communication inexpensive) and more robust against the attacks in comparison to the traditional schemes.