Lightweight Authentication and Encryption for Online Monitoring in IIoT Environments

Emerging industrial technologies building upon lightweight, mobile and connected embedded devices increase the need for trust and enforcing access control in industrial environments. We propose an approach which combines Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), firmware fingerprinting and Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) for enabling authentication and fine-grained access control of the data generated on the IoT end nodes. This approach is evaluated using an experimental setup and its feasibility for online monitoring in industrial environments is demonstrated. The proposed architecture adds a processing overhead of under 1% on a low-cost microcontroller and a communication latency of 144 ms over a long-range wireless link, while having a low power consumption and protecting against multiple cyber-threats.