DC-IIoT: A Secure and Efficient Authentication Protocol for Industrial Internet-of-Things Based on Distributed Control Plane

Abstract

Proper access control and communication security are the key requirements for real-time data-transfer in Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT). Besides, the system reliability and robustness may be affected, as the traffic volume is increasing gradually, and there may be heterogeneous IoT-devices in the network. Hence, a global control over the entire network becomes crucial to ensure Quality-of-Service (QoS). As the IoT-devices operate from a remote location with no (or minimum) human intervention, they may be compromised easily. Hence, it becomes essential to guarantee the system security even if one or more IoT-devices are compromised unexpectedly. Recently, some Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based approaches have been proposed to ensure communication security and global control over heterogeneous IoT-devices. However, they may suffer from single-point-of-failure due to the use of a centralized SDN controller. In this article, we put forward a secure and efficient authentication protocol for IIoT based applications using distributed control plane, named DC-IIoT. DC-IIoT can achieve the required security and design properties, and overcome single-point-of-failure by incorporating physically distributed and logically centralized SDN controllers. DC-IIoT also introduces a (t,n)-threshold-based authentication approach for cloning attack detection. The performance of DC-IIoT has been analyzed in terms of various security, privacy and performance factors, and compared with other similar protocols. The empirical results are quite encouraging.