Abstract:

With the increased scale of Industry 4.0 systems, security of Industry Internet of Things (IIoT) became a critical challenge. Many devices still use legacy cryptographic algorithms which are often too "heavy" for limited resources of most hardware platforms. In this work, a hybrid approach is investigated - a combination of lightweight cryptographic protocols with Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) used for key generation and device authentication.

The aim was to verify if such integration may bring practical security benefits without putting extensive load on the embedded systems. Four lightweight protocols have been tested - Speck, Ascon-128, EAP and Kerberos - both by themselves, as well as in combination with PUF. Each implementation has been evaluated for processing time, memory footprint and resilience to attacks and errors.

Results show a clear compromise - adding PUF improves key uniqueness and resilience to model ing attacks. However, it slightly lowers error tolerance. Kerberos turned out to be the most stable, while Speck was the fastest. In general, hybrid model implementations seem to be feasible and promising for real-world IIoT deployments. Further verification of hardware implementation is required to confirm usability in noisy industrial environments.