As security issues facing the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) continue to emerge, industrial organizations are working to further improve the security system. Zero trust (ZT) is seen as the future of industrial security, with a rising voice, but currently, no concrete implementation technique is available. In this article, we start with the requirements of ZT security and attempt to design a ZT technical framework applicable to wireless IIoT. Specifically, a three-step ZT security framework is proposed that builds on the benefits of physical-layer security to enhance ZT in IIoT. Security zone formation is done first, which then facilitates a trusted environment for subsequent device authentication and cryptographic negotiation. By integrating physical-layer security, several promising techniques, including artificial noise, physical fingerprint, and key distribution, are well designed to accomplish the proposed framework. Our analysis reveals that the proposed framework and the designed particular implementation techniques are feasible to enhance ZT security in wireless IIoT.

Residing in the proximity of end devices, edge computing (EC) holds great potential to provide low-latency, energy-efficient, and secure services, which has become an essential part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). To future accelerate task processing and reduce service latency, this work proposes an online incentive-driven task allocation scheme to stimulate collaborative computing among EC servers and IIoT devices. To better serve dynamic and heterogeneous tasks in terms of profiles and importance, EC servers (including neighboring servers) and IIoT devices with available resources can cooperatively process the tasks. Considering the heterogeneity of computing resources in edge servers and industrial IoT devices, we formulate a task allocation problem, which is NP hard. An online incentive-driven task allocation algorithm is proposed to this NP-hard problem, which will optimize task assignment strategies to maximize system utility, promote faster computing, and stimulate collaborative computing. Theoretical analyses show that the online incentive algorithm can satisfy incentive compatibility, individual rationality, computational efficiency, and feasibility. The results demonstrate that the proposed task allocation scheme with collaborative EC achieves superior performance and effectiveness.

The introduction of information and communication technologies makes network environments increasingly open, leaving smart-grid control systems incredibly vulnerable to malicious attacks. False data injection (FDI) attacks stealthily tamper with measurement data, resulting in erroneous decisions made by the control center that greatly influence the normal operation of the power system. By taking advantage of real-time data acquisition with edge computing, in this article, we propose a scheme based on classification of predicted residuals (CPRs) for the FDI attack detection. The CPR scheme first predicts the acquired measurement data at the edge of the sensing network via developing an accurate prediction model. Followed the novel real-time classification method under the edge devices supporting, it classifies the predicted residuals independent of the false data to enhance the detection accuracy. Through these two steps, the detection rate of FDI attacks is greatly improved. The proposed scheme is validated in a real microgrid testbed. Experimental results show that the CPR scheme performs well in detecting FDI attacks and remains sensitive in injection attack probability and magnitude. The detection scheme even has effectiveness at low injection attack probability and magnitude (5% and 0.018 per thousand, respectively). Furthermore, it also proves that the proposed scheme has applicability in high real-time requirements at the edge of smart grids.

Edge computing (EC) is an essential component of large-scale intelligent manufacturing systems for Industry 4.0, which promises to provide a preprocessing platform for the massive data generated by the terminals and guarantee lower delay and more security compared to directly processing data in cloud computing. Nevertheless, access authentication is a crucial security issue of current EC systems, and, thus, this article presents a solution to enhance the access classification accuracy by exploiting the physical layer information. Our method employs a weighted voting scheme for channel state information based authentication using a single sample which includes sample segmentation, grouping, and weighted voting and finally achieves the fast and low complexity secure-access requirement of the EC system without increasing the individual devices’ sample size and computational complexity. Experimental results utilizing public datasets and field-measured datasets demonstrate that the proposed weighted voting method has higher accuracy and robustness than existing methods.

In this article, a hierarchical task offloading strategy is presented for delay-tolerant and delay-sensitive missions by integrating edge computing and artificial intelligence into Cybertwin-based network to guarantee user Quality of Experience (QoE), low latency, and ultrareliable services, which are huge challenges to the Internet of Things (IoT) due to diverse application requirements, heterogeneous multidimensional resources, and time-varying network environments. The novel scheme achieves faster task processing, dynamic real-time allocation, and lower overhead by taking advantages of a multiagent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG). Moreover, federated learning is used to train the MADDPG model. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves system processing efficiency and task completion ratio compared to the benchmark schemes.