The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming an integral component of the industrial market in areas such as automation and analytics, giving rise to what is termed as the Industrial IoT (IIoT). The IIoT promises innovative business models in various industrial domains by providing ubiquitous connectivity, efficient data analytics tools, and better decision support systems for a better market competitiveness. However, IIoT deployments are vulnerable to a variety of security threats at various levels of the connectivity and communications infrastructure. The complex nature of the IIoT infrastructure means that availability, confidentiality and integrity are difficult to guarantee, leading to a potential distrust in the network operations and concerns of loss of critical infrastructure, compromised safety of network end-users and privacy breaches on sensitive information. This work attempts to look at the requirements currently specified for a secure IIoT ecosystem in industry standards, such as Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and OpenFog Consortium, and to what extent current IIoT connectivity protocols and platforms hold up to the standards with regard to security and privacy. The paper also discusses possible future research directions to enhance the security, privacy and safety of the IIoT.

In this paper we present an overview of the various proximity based authentication mechanisms that can be used in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). We seek to identify and highlight from a holistic point of view which mechanisms can enable proximity based authentication for the Industrial Internet of Things. In addition, we identify which upcoming proximity authentication mechanisms are most important for the proliferation of the Industrial Internet of Things, and highlight major obstacles that remain unsolved with regard to authentication. In answering this, we present seven mechanisms for proximity based authentication (i.e. wire, radio, acoustics, light, image, gesture and biometrics) and discuss each mechanism in perspective of their vulnerability to different kind of attacks (such as eavesdropping, impersonation and denial of service attacks etc.) and their usability (such as proximity range, hardware requirement and ease of use) in terms of the practicality in IIoT environment in the light of which we present two typical IIoT use cases that require proximity based authentication.

Group communication enables Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate in an efficient and fast manner. In most instances, a group message needs to be encrypted using a cryptographic key that only devices in the group know. In this paper, we address the problem of establishing such a key using a lattice-based one-way function, which can easily be inverted using a suitably designed lattice trapdoor. Using the notion of a bad/good basis, we present a new method of coupling multiple private keys into a single public key, which is then used for encrypting a group message. The protocol has the apparent advantage of having a conjectured resistance against potential quantum-computer-based attacks. All functions—key establishment, session key update, node addition, encryption, and decryption—are effected in constant time, using simple linear-algebra operations, making the protocol suitable for resource-constrained IoT networks. We show how a cryptographic session group key can be constructed on the fly by a user with legitimate credentials, making node-capture-type attacks impractical. The protocol also incorporates a mechanism for node addition and session-key generation in a forward- and backward-secrecy-preserving manner.