The industrial control systems are facing an increasing number of sophisticated cyber attacks that can have very dangerous consequences on humans and their environments. In order to deal with these issues, novel technologies and approaches should be adopted. In this paper, we focus on the security of commands in industrial IoT against forged commands and misrouting of commands. To this end, we propose a security architecture that integrates the Blockchain and the Software-defined network (SDN) technologies. The proposed security architecture is composed of: (a) an intrusion detection system, namely RSL-KNN, which combines the Random Subspace Learning (RSL) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) to defend against the forged commands, which target the industrial control process, and (b) a Blockchain-based Integrity Checking System (BICS), which can prevent the misrouting attack, which tampers with the OpenFlow rules of the SDN-enabled industrial IoT systems. We test the proposed security solution on an Industrial Control System Cyber attack Dataset and on an experimental platform combining software-defined networking and blockchain technologies. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed security solution.

Multicontroller software‐defined networks have been widely adopted to enable management of large‐scale networks. However, they are vulnerable to several attacks including false data injection, which creates topology inconsistency among controllers. To deal with this issue, we propose BMC‐SDN, a security architecture that integrates blockchain and multicontroller SDN and divides the network into several domains. Each SDN domain is managed by one master controller that communicates through blockchain with the masters of the other domains. The master controller creates blocks of network flow updates, and its redundant controllers validate the new block based on a proposed reputation mechanism. The reputation mechanism rates the controllers, i.e., block creator and voters, after each voting operation using constant and combined adaptive fading reputation strategies. The evaluation results demonstrate a fast and optimal detection of fraudulent flow rule injection.

Security analysts have shown that it is possible to compromise the mobile two-factor authentication applications that employ SMS-based authentication. In this paper, we consider that offloading mobile applications to the cloud, which is resource-rich and provides a more secure environment, represents a good solution when energy limitation and security constraints are raised. To this end, we propose an offloading architecture for the two-factor mutual authentication applications, and a novel two-factor mutual authentication scheme based on a novel mechanism, named virtual smart card. We also propose a decision-making process to offload the authentication application and its virtual smart card, based on three conditions: security, mobile device’s residual energy, and energy cost. We analytically derive from the energy cost formula, the lower-bound on the mobile application running time to perform offloading. We analyze and verify the security properties of the proposed architecture, and provide evaluation results of the two-factor mutual authentication protocol and the offloading decision-making process.