Hyper Elliptic Curve Based Certificateless Signcryption Scheme for Secure IIoT Communications

Industrial internet of things (IIoT) is the usage of internet of things(IoT) devices and applications for the purpose of sensing, processing andcommunicating real-time events in the industrial system to reduce the unnecessary operational cost and enhance manufacturing and other industrial-relatedprocesses to attain more profits. However, such IoT based smart industriesneed internet connectivity and interoperability which makes them susceptibleto numerous cyber-attacks due to the scarcity of computational resourcesof IoT devices and communication over insecure wireless channels. Therefore, this necessitates the design of an efficient security mechanism for IIoTenvironment. In this paper, we propose a hyperelliptic curve cryptography(HECC) based IIoT Certificateless Signcryption (IIoT-CS) scheme, with theaim of improving security while lowering computational and communicationoverhead in IIoT environment. HECC with 80-bit smaller key and parameterssizes offers similar security as elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with 160-bitlong key and parameters sizes. We assessed the IIoT-CS scheme security byapplying formal and informal security evaluation techniques. We used Realor Random (RoR) model and the widely used automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation tool for formalsecurity analysis and proved that the IIoT-CS scheme provides resistance tovarious attacks. Our proposed IIoT-CS scheme is relatively less expensivecompared to the current state-of-the-art in terms of computational cost andcommunication overhead. Furthermore, the IIoT-CS scheme is 31.25% and 51.31% more efficient in computational cost and communication overhead,respectively, compared to the most recent protocol.