CMAF-IIoT: Chaotic map-based authentication framework for Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) revolutionizes industrial production using smart devices (SMDs) deployed in IIoT environments. These SMDs collect and transmit information from target fields for analysis and can be controlled remotely. In emergency situations, real-time access to specific SMD information is crucial for prompt actions. However, ensuring secure and reliable communication between users and SMDs in untrusted channels is a significant challenge. Privacy concerns and the limitations of existing authentication frameworks further exacerbate this challenge, necessitating a lightweight cryptography-based authentication framework. This framework is essential to enable secure and reliable communication in the diverse IIoT environ-ment while addressing privacy leakage threats and the computational constraints of IoT devices. Recently, various lightweight cryptography-based authenticated encryption (AE) schemes have been proposed to enable encryption and decryption services for resource-constrained IIoT devices. ASCON, an efficient AE scheme, offers confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity in a single encryption and decryption operation, reducing the number of cryptographic operations required for authentication framework design. This paper presents CMAF-IIoT, a chaotic map and resource-efficient AE scheme (ASCON)-based authentication framework for IIoT, addressing the aforementioned challenges. CMAF-IIoT ensures reliable communication between SMDs and users. The framework begins with user-performed local authentication on their smart devices, followed by the establishment of a session key with the SMD after mutual authentication with the gateway. Using the session key, users securely access real-time information from SMDs deployed in the IIoT environment. The security of CMAF-IIoT is validated through formal and informal security analyses. Additionally, the efficiency of CMAF-IIoT is evaluated in terms of communication, computational, and storage costs. The results indicate that CMAF-IIoT requires [6.67% to 53.33%] low storage cost, [45.13% to 65.87%] low computational cost, and [16.46% to 83.29%] low communication cost compared to contrasted authentication frameworks. These findings highlight the viability of CMAF-IIoT for the IIoT environment, as it provides resource efficiency and enhanced security features.