Designing access control security protocol for Industry 4.0 using Blockchain‐as‐a‐Service

Industry 4.0 is a revolution of the operations in the industrial manufacturing for increased productivity, trade and commerce. It is heavily reliant on the automation of the processes and equipment along with complex interconnectivity and insightful analysis using machine learning. The interconnectivity of the manufacturing devices from various industrial sites brings with it several security issues related to communication. This article focuses on solving the security issue of access control between such devices and enable seamless secure communication for the proper functioning of the industry. An access control scheme has been proposed that achieves the necessary security features of anonymity, traceability, and forward secrecy. It is also shown that the proposed scheme takes less communication and computational costs, and is strongly resilient against various attacks such as impersonation attack, replay attack, and denial‐of‐service attack as compared to other relevant schemes.