A high-security batch message authentication protocol assisted by edge servers in industrial Internet of Things

As the number of smart devices increases dramatically in industrial IoT (IIoT) systems, a large amount of privacy-sensitive data could be generated in manufacturing operations, and more message authentication operations need to be performed. Meanwhile, the processing of such data has to meet stringent requirements on communication latency, reliability, and security. However, the resource constraint in the IIoT systems prevents legacy resource-intensive security measures from being used directly in the systems. To address the massive data security issue with the consideration of the limitations of resource-constrained devices, we propose a new batch message authentication protocol supported by edge computing. Specifically, we propose to offload message authentication operations to the edge servers to reduce the authentication burden on the devices. Meanwhile, the protocol uses certificateless aggregate signatures to verify the legitimacy of messages in large batches, significantly reducing signaling overhead and avoiding key escrow. The proposed protocol has been formally verified by using Scyther tool, which demonstrates its capacity against major typical malicious attacks. Furthermore, the performance evaluation results show that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational and communication costs.