A provably secure two-way authenticated key agreement protocol for IIoT environments

In the ever-evolving Internet landscape and the broad adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in various industries, secure communication is imperative, especially in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This research addresses the critical need for secure wireless sensor networks within the IIoT by proposing a novel Two-Party Authenticated Key Agreement (2PAKA) protocol and an efficient authentication protocol tailored for IIoT wireless sensor networks. The proposed 2PAKA protocol guarantees provable security within the Dolev-Yao model, relying on the hardness of the Computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) and Bilinear Diffie–Hellman (BDH) assumptions. Simultaneously, the wireless sensor network authentication protocol enhances physical-layer security of devices, reducing computational and communication costs. A pre-authentication mechanism between the gateway and cloud server helps reduce the overall cost. Rigorous security analyses, coupled with extensive testing and evaluation against other related approaches, confirm the protocol’s security and efficiency gain. The practical implementation demonstrates significant cost reductions on both the sensor side and the overall computational infrastructure.