Abstract
Industrial internet of things (IIoT) is the usage of internet of things (IoT) devices and applications for the purpose of sensing, processing and communicating real-time events in the industrial system to reduce the unneces-sary operational cost and enhance manufacturing and other industrial-related processes to attain more profits. However, such IoT based smart industries need internet connectivity and interoperability which makes them susceptible to numerous cyber-attacks due to the scarcity of computational resources of IoT devices and communication over insecure wireless channels. There-fore, this necessitates the design of an efficient security mechanism for IIoT environment. In this paper, we propose a hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC) based IIoT Certificateless Signcryption (IIoT-CS) scheme, with the aim of improving security while lowering computational and communication overhead in IIoT environment. HECC with 80-bit smaller key and parameters sizes offers similar security as elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with 160-bit long key and parameters sizes. We assessed the IIoT-CS scheme security by applying formal and informal security evaluation techniques. We used Real or Random (RoR) model and the widely used automated validation of inter -net security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation tool for formal security analysis and proved that the IIoT-CS scheme provides resistance to various attacks. Our proposed IIoT-CS scheme is relatively less expensive compared to the current state-of-the-art in terms of computational cost and communication 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.