A Lightweight Authentication Scheme Based on Consortium Blockchain for Cross-Domain IoT

Yujian Zhang,Fei Tong,Jun Tao,Guang Cheng,Xing Chen,Yuhao Luo,Yuwei Xu,Wenjuan Li

doi:10.1155/2022/9686049

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) has been ubiquitous in both industrial and living areas, but also known for its weak security. Being as the first defense line against various cyberattacks, authentication is even more critical to IoT applications. Moreover, there has been a growing demand for cross-domain collaboration, leading to an increasing need for cross-domain authentication. Recently, certificate-based authentication schemes have been extensively studied. However, many of these schemes are not efficient in computation, storage, and communication, which are highly required in IoT. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication scheme based on consortium blockchain and design a cryptocurrency-like digital token to build trust. Furthermore, trust lifecycle management is performed by manipulating the amount of tokens. The comprehensive analysis and evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme is resistant to various common attacks and more efficient than competitor schemes in terms of storage, communication, and authentication cost.

Highlights

With the great power of bridging the physical world to the cyberspace, the Internet of ings (IoT) brings new paradigms for supporting diverse applications, such as smart cities, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare
While enjoying the significant convenience brought by IoT, we need to be aware that IoT is still facing a bunch of challenges. e most critical one should be IoT security, since most IoT devices are limited in computation, storage, and network capacity; they have weak security and are more vulnerable to cyberattacks [2]
Motivated by the fact that its structure well matches the model of cross-domain IoT, we propose a lightweight authentication scheme for cross-domain IoT based on consortium blockchain. e main idea is to utilize a digital token, named LiIDCoin (Lightweight IDentity Coin), to represent the trust of the identity of an IoT device or an entity

Summary

Introduction

With the great power of bridging the physical world to the cyberspace, the Internet of ings (IoT) brings new paradigms for supporting diverse applications, such as smart cities, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare. According to a Statista report, the number of global IoT devices is forecast to triple from 8.74 billion in 2020 to more than 25.4 billion in 2030 [1]. E surging number suggests that IoT technology has been deeply involved in our daily lives. In 2016, Mirai botnet took control of millions of IoT devices and launched an incredibly powerful Distributed Deny-of-Service (DDoS) attack [3]. As reported by Gartner, 20% of organizations have experienced at least one IoT attack in the past three years [4]. There is an urgent demand for defensive strategies to protect IoT applications

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion