OMEGA: A Comprehensive Cloud-Edge-Device Authentication and Key Agreement Scheme for Collaborative Multi-Factory Manufacturing in IIoT

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) has revolutionized traditional manufacturing by enabling resource sharing across factory boundaries. As industry increasingly adopts cloud-edge-device collaborative ecosystems, effective authentication and key agreement (AKA) mechanisms play a critical role in safeguarding security across these complex multi-factory environments. Existing schemes, however, focus primarily on isolated binary security relationships (e.g., device-edge, device-cloud, or edge-cloud pairs individually), neglecting the integrated cloud-edge-device collaborative security demands inherent in multi-factory environments, while often relying on trusted authorities and high-overhead cryptographic mechanisms. This leads to redundant authentication processes, increased latency, and security vulnerabilities as devices must separately establish connections with each entity. To bridge these gaps, this paper introduces OMEGA: a comprehensive Cloud-Edge-Device Authentication and Key Agreement scheme for collaborative multi-factory manufacturing that pioneers an integrated security architecture. OMEGA’s distinctive advantage lies in its ability to establish all necessary secure connections (device-edge, device-cloud, and edge-cloud) through a single authentication request from the smart manufacturing device (SMD), significantly reducing authentication overhead. By leveraging lightweight hash operation, OMEGA creates a cohesive security fabric that enables SMDs to concurrently access specialized capabilities from multiple clouds while leveraging edge computing for time-sensitive operations. Security analysis using both Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and ProVerif formal verification tool demonstrates OMEGA achieves robust security while performance evaluation confirms its superior efficiency in industrial environments.