Design of Ultra-lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol and Its Application on Industrial Control Systems

Abstract

In operational technology Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are computing systems used to operate the critical infrastructures at the national level including power plant and water supply network public transportation manufacturing and so on Therefore the cybersecurity of ICSs has a certain relevance to homeland security Different from the traditional information technology systems the development of ICSs is considering additional environmental requirements such as hard real-time interactions resource-constrained devices and high availability systems Consequently the improvement of ICS’s security mechanism is essential to meet these requirements Much research has successively proposed security solutions for ICSs in recent years However these solutions may either require over-priced cryptographic methods or incomprehensible security mechanisms Dedicated to the ultra-lightweight mutual authentication protocol this thesis delves into its cybersecurity issues indicated in previous research and further applies it to ICSs Firstly this thesis points out that Tewari and Gupta’s protocol suffers from the disclosure attack the de-synchronization attack and the man-in-the-middle attack Secondly an improved protocol proposed by Wang et al being susceptible to the disclosure attack is also demonstrated Finally a new ARX-based ultra-lightweight mutual authentication protocol is proposed that overcomes the environmental limitations of ICSs and solves its present cybersecurity issues

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tzone-Lih Hwang (Supervisor)