Coordinated Security Measures for Industrial IoT Against Eavesdropping

Building cyber security ecosystems for industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices is a challenging task for operators and device vendors. The confidentiality concerns of exchanged IoT data cannot be ignored since industrial IoT devices are embedded in many critical control applications where the protection of intellectual property is very important. A physical layer-based security approach for industrial IoT devices is presented in this article to achieve defined levels of information confidentiality against eavesdropping, and a coordinated transmission strategy is proposed for industrial IoT devices threatened by eavesdroppers. Building on a spectrum-sharing communication scheme, the industrial IoT devices collaborate to cause defined levels of signal outage on eavesdropping devices, limiting the eavesdroppers’ ability to decode the transmitted signals of the IoT device of interest. The analytical and numerical results in this article demonstrate the feasibility of the coordinated transmission strategy and the ability of the industrial IoT devices to achieve target signal quality and confidentiality security levels.