A Lightweight and Adaptive Authentication Scheme With Enhanced Security for Industrial Internet of Things

The rapid development of industrial digitalization has made secure and efficient authentication mechanisms for resource-constrained Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices increasingly important. However, existing authentication schemes often suffer from high computational overhead, limited adaptability to dynamic industrial environments, and delayed detection of credential compromises. To address these challenges, this article proposes a lightweight, adaptive, and security-enhanced authentication scheme tailored for IIoT systems. The scheme integrates physical unclonable function (PUF) technology for hardware-level security, applies SSS to manage PUF response instability, and incorporates a honeyword mechanism for proactive password leakage detection. Formal security analyses using BAN logic and ProVerif, along with heuristic assessments, demonstrate the scheme’s robustness against common IIoT threats, including impersonation, replay, and password-guessing attacks. Experimental results indicate that, under the stated assumptions and implementation settings, our scheme exhibits lower simulated computational cost (10.855 ms) and achieves an estimated sensor-node energy of 0.466 mJ on MICAz using Shim’s methodology. Taken together, these results indicate strong security with improved efficiency, suggesting practicality for evolving IIoT deployments.