Novel Blockchain-Integrated Quantum-Resilient Self-Certified Authentication Protocol for Cross-Industry Communications

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) aims at improving the manufacturing cost and quality by inter-connection of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices. In the 4IR, IIoT-based machines need to collaborate securely and autonomously through the insecure Internet channel. Although various blockchain-based protocols have been introduced for securing cross-industry Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, they, are insecure to some cyberattacks, rely on some intermediary servers for successful M2M authentication, are not efficient enough to be employed in the context of IIoT environments, and are not resilient to quantum computers. To address these weaknesses, this paper suggests a novel quantum-resilient self-certified authentication protocol for cross-industry communications using the cutting-edge blockchain technology. Thanks to the blockchain ledger, the cross-industry connections have been facilitated and thanks to the self-certified approach, the blockchain referrals have been reduced to only one ledger reading. In our protocol, no intermediary server needs to involve and IIoT machines can directly authenticate each other. The advantages and efficiency enhancements of our protocol, compared to top-related ones, are shown, respectively, by comparative property and performance analyses. Specifically, our protocol indicates 13% and 91% improvements in communication and computation overheads over the most efficient protocol.