Robust and Lightweight Key Exchange (LKE) Protocol for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 has brought solutions for faster data accessibility, fault identification, performance analysis, and control of machines remotely by managers. Though beneficial but dangerous as the IoT (Internet of Things) nodes communicate over the unsecured wireless medium. The communication over unsecured wireless channel opened enormous ways for the illegitimate nodes to access the information and take control over the industrial machines despite being physically away. These threats can be overpowered with secure sessions; however, the exchange of keys to establish a secure session over a vulnerable channel becomes a challenge. Our approach (LKE) intend to solve this problem. LKE provides a lightweight key exchange platform to the legitimate IoT nodes and prohibit the unauthorized abuses. LKE uses lightweight Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) based implicit certificates for trust-building and generating keys among entities. All the messages exchanged are secured to prevent unauthorized access to information and preventing against forgery, replay, modification, impersonation and man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. The proposed scheme is tested on the AVISPA tool and results indicate its trustworthiness and strong resistivity against potential attacks. LKE has less computation and communication complexities due to the utilization of limited cryptographic operations which make it superior in comparison to other state-of-the-work.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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