An Authentication Framework for Multi-Domain Machine-to-Machine Communication in Cyber-Physical Systems

In the near future, the cyber-physical system (CPS), will have all the objects in the cyber world and the physical world connected. The speed of information exchange and processing will be faster, while the abilities of controlling facilities and handling events will be more powerful and our lives will be better. In the CPS, machine to machine (M2M) communication is in charge of data collection and transmission which utilizes both wireless and wired systems to monitor physical or environmental conditions and exchange the information among different systems without direct human intervention. As a part of CPS, M2M communication is considerable important while being fragile at the same time because M2M communication still faces lots of security threats. There are some security vulnerabilities that yet to be solved. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed authentication framework for multi-domain M2M environment. The proposed framework applies hybrid encryption scheme involving identity-based cryptography (IBC) and advanced encryption standard (AES). The security analysis shows that the proposed framework is well designed and could withstand Man-in-the-Middle attacks, impersonation attacks, reply attacks and compromised attacks, etc.