A survey on security and cryptographic perspective of Industrial-Internet-of-Things

The Industrial-Internet-of-Things (IIoT) powers several applications in the modern world: smart city, smart grid, smart manufacturing, smart logistics management, etc. The increased connectivity and smartness bring a rich attack surface for adversaries. Past research efforts have extensively explored the security aspects of IIoT. Still, none of them took a cryptographic perspective of IIoT security, which is imperative because almost all modern cyber defenses are based on cryptographic primitives. We address this issue in this work. We present a cryptographic perspective of IIoT for the designers and developers. We review the desirable security properties and existing attacks against the IIoT infrastructure. We then review conventional cryptographic tools used to secure modern IIoT networks. Finally, we discuss shortcomings associated with traditional cryptography and recommend Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) techniques that could be integrated with IIoT. Finally, we present future research directions on using cryptography for IIoT environments.