Abstract
Security and privacy of data-in-transit are critical issues in Industry 4.0, which are further amplified by the use of faster communication technologies such as 6G. Along with security issues, computation and communication costs, as well as data confidentiality, must be also accommodated. In this article, we design a cybertwin-based cloud-centric network architecture to improve the flexibility and scalability of 6G industrial networks. Cybertwin not only enables the deployment of advanced security solutions but also provides an always-on connection. However, the security of data-in-transit over wireless communication between users/things and cybertwin remains a concern. Hence, a privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on digital signature and authenticated key exchange protocol is designed to address the security concerns of data exchanged. In addition, we conduct a security analysis that proves that the scheme resists several attacks in the Industry 4.0 environment. Moreover, the evaluation performed confirmed the superiority of the proposed work comparing to the existing works.