A blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme for edge computing services

Abstract

Edge computing is a new paradigm, especially suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which require low latency, location awareness and mass connections. It surely makes up for some shortcomings in cloud computing in terms of energy consumption and real-time analysis areas. However, it is still a great challenge to guarantee data security and privacy protection in edge computing environment. In this paper, we focus on the topic of authentication in edge computing and propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme based on blockchain, which guarantees user anonymity, conditional traceability as well as multi-factor security. The scheme uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and does not use bilinear pairing operations. The key materials are stored on the blockchain and managed by the smart contracts. Formal security proof and heuristic security analysis show that the protocol satisfies desired security requirements and resists against most kinds of conventional attacks. Moreover, the performance comparison shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient in computation and communication than previous related schemes.