A Secure One-to-Many Authentication Protocol for Industrial IoT (IIoT) Applications

In the evolving Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, efficient and secure authentication protocols are crucial for protecting the networks from unauthorized access and ensuring seamless communication between the devices, especially in an environment where a central authority such as a gateway or a server needs to communicate with multiple devices. Most of the existing security protocols employ computationally expensive cryptographic schemes, which makes them unsuitable for resource-constrained IoT devices in terms of memory capacity and computational capabilities. Further, many existing protocols focus on one-to-one communication where one device communicates with another, ignoring scenarios where multiple devices need to communicate with each other simultaneously. This article examines how combining Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) with secure session key generation creates unique, device-specific identities without imposing significant computational burdens. Our solution is not only secure but also efficient in large-scale IoT networks. The proposed research presents a lightweight, robust authentication scheme for resource-constrained devices, and we compare our work to other existing research outcomes. Furthermore, we conducted a formal analysis using AVISPA to validate our solution. AVISPA results proved that our solution framework meets all the necessary security goals and requirements. Finally, we performed an informal evaluation to examine the robustness of our solution against some of the well-known attacks.