An Efficient Web Authentication Mechanism Preventing Man-In-The-Middle Attacks in Industry 4.0 Supply Chain

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is transforming the next generation of the supply chain by making it more agile and efficient compared with the traditional supply chain. However, data communication across the partners in the Industry 4.0 supply chain can be the target of a wide spectrum of attackers exploiting security breaches in the internal/external environment of the partners due to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature as well as the fact that the non-professional users in security issues usually operate their information systems. Attackers can compromise the data communication between legitimate parties in the Industry 4.0 Supply Chain, and thus, jeopardizing the delivery of services across the partners as well as the continuity of the service provision. Consequently, secure data communications across the partners in the Industry 4.0 Supply Chain are of utmost importance. Toward this direction, TLS protocol, which is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications, is employed to ensure secure communication between a user’s web browser and a remote web server located in the premises of the same or another partner. However, over the last few years, there have been several serious attacks on TLS, including man-in-the-middle attacks in web applications using TLS to secure HTTP communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient TLS-based authentication mechanism, which is resistant against MITM in web applications.