Title: Efficient authentication framework with Blake2s and a hash-based signature scheme for Industry 4.0 applications

Authors: Purvi Tandel; Jitendra Nasriwala

Addresses: Department of Information Technology and Cyber Security, Chhotubhai Gopalbhai Patel Institute of Technology, Uka Tarsadia University, Surat, Gujarat, India ' Babu Madhav Institute of Information Technology, Uka Tarsadia University, Surat, Gujarat, India

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: authentication mechanism; hash-based signature scheme; IoT applications; hash functions; SHA-256; Blake2s; SHA-3; collision resistant hash-function.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIEI.2024.142416

International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, 2024 Vol.12 No.4, pp.410 - 432

Received: 26 Jan 2024
Accepted: 20 May 2024
Published online: 30 Oct 2024 *

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