Privacy-preserving authentication for general directed graphs in industrial IoT

Abstract

Previous solutions on security and privacy in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) focus primarily on the data or the deployment and communication problems of devices. However, the management and authentication of IoT devices for IIoT systems has received less attention. To facilitate the research on this area, we take the IIoT control system as an example. It is crucial to authenticate the relationships among devices to ensure that data can only be accessed by authenticated parties. In this paper, we provide a feasible solution to address the aforementioned issue. Considering that a directed graph can be used to intuitively represent such relationships, we present a dynamically updatable privacy-preserving authentication scheme for general directed graphs. Specifically, our scheme is based on the cryptographic accumulator and an underlying standard digital signature scheme. We formalize its security notions and prove its security under the adaptive chosen-message attacks. The efficiency of our scheme is evaluated in order to illustrate its practically for real-world applications.