A Secure Fog-Based Architecture for Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0

The advent of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) along with cloud computing has brought a huge paradigm shift in manufacturing industries resulting in yet another industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. Huge amounts of delay-sensitive data of diverse nature are being generated, which need to be locally processed and secured because of their sensitivity. However, the low-end Internet of Things devices are unable to handle huge computational overheads. In addition, the semi-trusted nature of cloud introduces several security concerns. To address these issues, this article proposes a secure fog-based IIoT architecture by suitably plugging a number of security features into it and by offloading some of the tasks judiciously to fog nodes. These features secure the system alongside reducing the trust and burden on the cloud and resource-constrained devices, respectively. We validate our proposed architecture through both theoretical overhead analysis and practical experimentation, including simulation study and testbed implementation.