Authenblue: A New Authentication Protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is where almost anything can be controlled and managed remotely by means of sensors. Although the IoT evolution led to quality of life enhancement, many of its devices are insecure. The lack of robust key management systems, efficient identity authentication, low fault tolerance, and many other issues lead to IoT devices being easily targeted by attackers. In this paper we propose a new authentication protocol called Authenblue that improve the authentication process of IoT devices and Coordinators of Personal Area Network (CPANs) in an Industrial IoT (IIoT) environment. This study proposed Authenblue protocol as a new Blockchain-based authentication protocol. To enhance the authentication process and make it more secure, Authenblue modified the way of generating IIoT identifiers and the shared secret keys used by the IIoT devices to raise the efficiency of the authentication protocol. Authenblue enhance the authentication protocol that other models rely on by enhancing the approach used to generate the User Identifier (UI). The UI values changed from being static values, sensors MAC addresses, to be generated values in the inception phase. This approach makes the process of renewing the sensor keys more secure by renewing their UI values instead of changing the secret key. In this study, Authenblue has been simulated in the Network Simulator 3 (NS3). Simulation results show an improved performance compared to the related work.