Provably secure multilayers certificateless proxy signature for industrial internet of things

The emergent nature of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs) raises significant authentication concerns in Certificateless Proxy Signature (CLPS) to ensure protection from modern forgery attacks. Due to some modern forgery attacks, single layer authentication is unable to provide secure CLPS with optimal computational cost and communication overhead in IIoTs. Therefore, multilayer authentication is required to secure the identities of the participants on open channel using Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) mechanism. It offers a promising opportunity for addressing authentication vulnerabilities in IIoTs. This article proposes an optimal and secure multilayer authentication technique with minimum computational cost and communication overhead. The proposed mechanism evolved CLPS with zero knowledge proof using Schnorr signature in a transparent way, whereas, the security hardness of the proposed work is demonstrated informally with Hyperelliptic Curve (HEC). Moreover, for formal verification, AVISPA tool is used. Performance analysis depicts that the proposed approach exhibits not only lower computational cost and communication overhead but also provides optimal security as compared to existing approaches.