Abstract
The certificate authority, a trusted entity, issues digital certificates which contain identity credentials to help Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices to represent their authenticity in a secure means. The crucial challenge of a digital certificate is to how design a secure certification authority management system that can counteract cyberattacks on the IIoT network. Moreover, current IIoT systems are not capable of implementing complex mathematical operations due to their constrained power capacity and processing capability. This paper proposes an effective, secure symmetric cryptographic mechanism (ESSC) based on the certificate authority management and Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) to share a digital certificate among IIoT devices. The proposed certificate authority is used to securely exchange the shared secret key and to resolve the problem of spoofing attacks that may be used to impersonate the identity of the certificate authority. Also, ESSC uses the shared secret key to encrypt the sensitive data during transmission through the insecure communication channel. This research studies the adversary model for ESSC on IIoT and analyzes the cybersecurity of ESSC in the random oracle model. The findings that result from the experiments show that ESSC outperforms the baseline in terms of communication, computation, and storage costs. ESSC thus provides an adequate lightweight digital certificate management and cryptographic scheme which can help in the detection and prevention of several cyberattacks that can harm IIoT networks.