A physically secure and privacy-preserving cloud collaborative authentication scheme for industrial personal computer

In Industrial Personal Computer (IPC) terminals and their associated sensor devices are typically deployed in unattended environments with open communication channels, making them highly susceptible to security threats such as credential leakage, device compromise, and session key exposure. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication and key agreement protocol tailored for IPC-based cloud collaborative architectures. The proposed scheme integrates Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) with lightweight cryptographic mechanisms to achieve hardware-assisted secure authentication without relying on locally stored secrets. By leveraging PUFs to generate device-unique and non-reproducible responses, the scheme fundamentally eliminates the risk of key extraction caused by physical capture of devices. Furthermore, a dynamic pseudonym identity mechanism, combined with lightweight constructions based on hash and XOR operations, is employed to ensure user anonymity and enable efficient mutual authentication. By integrating lightweight algorithms, the protocol effectively resists multiple attacks, while significantly reducing computational overhead. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that, compared with existing scheme, the proposed protocol achieves approximately a 65% reduction in overall computational cost, while maintaining strong security guarantees and practical deployability. As a result, the proposed scheme provides a reliable security solution for IPC-based cloud collaborative environments.