Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Resource-Constrained Devices in IIoT

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) involves interconnected devices and sensors that exchange data in resource-constrained industrial environments. As the number of IIoT devices grows, ensuring secure communication becomes increasingly important. This paper proposes a lightweight authentication scheme leveraging elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and other lightweight cryptographic techniques to facilitate secure communication among IIoT devices while minimizing computational, communication, and storage overheads. We conduct thorough security evaluations using a stochastic Oracle model and the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) tool, as well as informal security analyses based on the Dolev–Yao channel model to validate the correctness of our approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers superior security and computational efficiency compared to existing authentication methods in similar contexts.