An authentication scheme with identity-based cryptography for M2M security in cyber-physical systems

The Internet has made the world smaller while there is still a gap between the cyber world and our physical world. In the future cyber-physical system CPS, all objects in cyber world and physical world would be connected, and the concepts of cyber world and physical world will no longer exist. The speed of information transmitting and processing will be faster, the abilities of controlling facilities and handling events will be more powerful, and our lives will be better. In the CPS, machine to machine M2M communication is in charge of data collecting and transmitting, which utilizes both wireless and wired systems to monitor physical or environmental conditions and exchange the information among different systems without direct human intervention. As a part of CPS, M2M communication is considerably important while being fragile at the same time because M2M communication still faces lots of security threats that are not only from outside but also from inside. In traditional M2M communication, the M2M service provider MSP is always assumed to be trusted. However, the MSP could be compromised in real world. In that case, the previous security solutions would fail because the most confidential materials are kept in the MSP by the conventional solutions. How to protect the entire system from the compromised MSP is one important problem the paper intends to solve. In addition, the communication bandwidth and energy resource for the M2M devices are precious. Another issue the paper is addressing is the design of efficient security schemes being able to save both energy and communication bandwidth. In this paper, an authentication scheme applying authenticated identity-based cryptography without key-escrow mechanism has been proposed. In the proposed scheme, only partial secrets instead of full secrets are stored in the MSP, which could prevent the compromised MSP from endangering the whole system. The authenticated encryption property of the proposed scheme could leave out the work of signature generation, transmission, and verification so as to save the computation and communication resource of the whole system. The security analysis with Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic BAN Logic and Simple Promela Interpreter SPIN shows that the proposed scheme is well designed and could withstand Man-in-the-Middle attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, DoS attacks, and compromised attacks. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.