Partial message verification in fog-based industrial Internet of things

Abstract

Due to the emergence of fog computing, the computational resources can be deployed close to the data source and conduct data-driven tasks. A typical scenario is integrity assurance in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, since the devices in IIoT scenario have low computation capability, they cannot verify the integrity of all incoming messages using traditional message authentication code (MAC), especially when the messages are in large volume and high frequency. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC scheme, namely, Partial Verification Message Authentication Code (PV-MAC), to partially offload the verification tasks to a device with more processing power, (e.g., a fog node). Moreover, the fog node can transparently choose parts of contents in the message for verification on behalf of the device that uses these data. Afterward, the user device can verify the integrity of the rest contents. The theoretical analysis and the experimental results show that our proposed schemes can achieve high efficiency and dynamic workload balancing while retaining a rigorous security guarantee.