A Post-Quantum Secure Solution for SECS/GEM Communications in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Application

The Semiconductor Equipment Communication Standard/Generic Equipment Model (SECS/GEM) protocol is an international standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) data interchange which has been widely accepted in the semiconductor and industrial automation industries for real-time equipment control and monitoring. But there is currently no security model that offers both full-spectrum protection, as well as light-weight performance and total resilience to quantum era cyber-threats. Existing improvements, e.g., SECS/GEMsec, Secured SECS/GEM, and ES-SECS/GEM either depend on traditional cryptographic building blocks susceptible to Shor-, Grover-based attacks or ensure security of the data only partially, thereby exposing the critical IIoT infrastructure to replaying, DoS, and post-quantum cryptanalysis vulnerabilities. To close this gap, we introduce Post-SECS/GEM, a post-quantum secure solution based on a combination of CRYSTALS-Kyber for key exchange and CRYSTALS-Dilithium for authentication that maintains seamless compatibility with current message formats utilized within SECS/GEM. The suggested architecture embeds a lightweight, lattice-based security construction ensuring the fulfillment of fundamental SECS/GEM security functionalities (e.g., mutual authentication, and preserving authenticity, secrecy and integrity of messages over the same channel), with respect to an adversary who could have unlimited computation power but no quantum capability in order to attack communication between devices without modifying or upgrading existing protocols or hardware. Performance evaluation on a typical IIoT testbed indicates that Post-SECS/GEM achieves better efficiency as compared to the current SECS/GEM security extensions, with decreased key establishment and authentication latency, predictable encryption/decryption performance, as well as acceptable computing and memory overheads in line with edge-class industrial devices. These findings demonstrate that Post-SECS/GEM is an efficient post-quantum secure approach for real-time SECS/GEM-based industrial communication in the present IIoT scenarios.