SDN-Enabled Multi-Attribute-Based Secure Communication for Smart Grid in IIoT Environment

TLDR

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an emerging technology with many smart devices used across sectors such as transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy management, yet existing secure communication solutions are unsuitable due to reliance on traditional TCP/IP infrastructure. This study proposes an SDN‑enabled multi‑attribute secure communication model for IIoT environments to address these shortcomings. The model comprises three phases: a cuckoo‑filter‑based SDN forwarding scheme, an attribute‑based encryption mechanism, and a Kerberos‑based peer authentication protocol. Evaluation demonstrates that the scheme outperforms existing solutions across multiple performance metrics.

Abstract

Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is an emerging technology with a large number of smart connected devices having sensing, storage, and computing capabilities. IIoT is used in a wide range of applications such as transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy management in smart grids. Most of the solutions reported in the literature for secure communications are not suitable for the aforementioned applications due to the usage of traditional TCP/IP-based network infrastructure. So, to handle this challenge, in this paper, a software-defined network (SDN) enabled multi-attribute secure communication model for an IIoT environment is designed. The proposed scheme works in three phases: 1) an SDN-IIoT communication model is designed using a cuckoo-filter-based fast-forwarding scheme, 2) an attribute-based encryption scheme is presented for secure data communication, and 3) a peer entity authentication scheme using a third party authenticator, Kerberos , is also presented. The proposed scheme has been evaluated using different parameters where the results obtained prove its effectiveness in comparison to the existing solutions.