Efficient authentication framework with Blake2s and a hash-based signature scheme for Industry 4.0 applications
Purvi Tandel, Jitendra Nasriwala · International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics · 2024
Industry 4.0, the new production standard, integrates small to medium-level devices for efficient automation. Secure communication among these devices requires protection from external attacks in IoT applications. The imminent threat of quantum attacks to prevailing public-key approaches necessitates a secure authentication architecture tailored for IoT devices. Furthermore, IoT devices' limited computing, storage, and energy resources demand a lightweight authentication mechanism. In response, hash-based signatures have been proposed as a post-quantum solution for Industry 4.0. Presented approach involves an in-depth analysis of collision-resistant hash functions for faster, memory-optimised authentication. Implementing a hash-based signature scheme through experiments, a 27.18% improvement has been achieved in key generation speed, particularly with Blake2s over popularly used SHA-256. These results affirm the efficiency of the proposed hash-based signature scheme, offering superior performance in time and memory utilisation for Industry 4.0 applications.