Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2022 Mar 27;22(7):2561.
doi: 10.3390/s22072561.

Revisiting the Feasibility of Public Key Cryptography in Light of IIoT Communications

Jasone Astorga  1 , Marc Barcelo  2 , Aitor Urbieta  2 , Eduardo Jacob  1
Affiliations
Review

Revisiting the Feasibility of Public Key Cryptography in Light of IIoT Communications

Jasone Astorga et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Digital certificates are regarded as the most secure and scalable way of implementing authentication services in the Internet today. They are used by most popular security protocols, including Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). The lifecycle management of digital certificates relies on centralized Certification Authority (CA)-based Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs). However, the implementation of PKIs and certificate lifecycle management procedures in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments presents some challenges, mainly due to the high resource consumption that they imply and the lack of trust in the centralized CAs. This paper identifies and describes the main challenges to implement certificate-based public key cryptography in IIoT environments and it surveys the alternative approaches proposed so far in the literature to address these challenges. Most proposals rely on the introduction of a Trusted Third Party to aid the IIoT devices in tasks that exceed their capacity. The proposed alternatives are complementary and their application depends on the specific challenge to solve, the application scenario, and the capacities of the involved IIoT devices. This paper revisits all these alternatives in light of industrial communication models, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and providing an in-depth comparative analysis.

Keywords: ABE; DTLS; IIoT; PKI; X.509; blockchain.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Traditional Certification Authority hierarchy.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Basic architecture of a SCADA system.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Message exchange of the DTLS 1.3 handshake protocol.
Figure 4
Figure 4
IP/UDP packet conveying a ClientHello message: (a) uncompressed, (b) compressed following the 6LoWPAN strategy.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Comparison between: (a) end-to-end encryption provided by ABE and (b) transport layer encryption provided by DTLS where end-to-end confidentiality is broken at the broker.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Structure of the blocks in the blockchain.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Comparison of pros & cons and different application scenarios of the analyzed approaches [21,22,23,24,26,27,28,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,39,40,41,42,44,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Salih K.O.M., Rashid T.A., Radovanovic D., Bacanin N. A Comprehensive Survey on the Internet of Things with the Industrial Marketplace. Sensors. 2022;22:730. doi: 10.3390/s22030730. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Nur N.M., Yusnani M.Y., Mohammed A.S., Hashim H. Hybrid cryptographic approach for internet of things applications: A review. J. Inf. Commun. Technol. 2020;19:279–319.
    1. Fernández-Caramés T.M. From Pre-Quantum to Post-Quantum IoT Security: A Survey on Quantum-Resistant Cryptosystems for the Internet of Things. IEEE Internet Things J. 2020;7:6457–6480. doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2958788. - DOI
    1. Alexander P., Baashirah R., Abuzneid A. Comparison and Feasibility of Various RFID Authentication Methods Using ECC. Sensors. 2018;18:2902. doi: 10.3390/s18092902. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wang P., Li B., Shi H., Shen Y., Wang D. Revisiting Anonymous Two-Factor Authentication Schemes for IoT-Enabled Devices in Cloud Computing Environments. Secur. Commun. Netw. 2019;2019:2516963. doi: 10.1155/2019/2516963. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources