Blockchain-Based Lightweight Authentication Mechanisms for Industrial Internet of Things and Information Systems

Abstract

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) necessitates robust cross-domain authentication to secure sensitive on-site equipment data. This paper presents a refined reputation-based lightweight consensus mechanism (LRBCM) tailored for IIoT's distributed network structures. Leveraging node reputation values, LRBCM streamlines ledger consensus, minimizing communication overhead and complexity. Comparative experiments show LRBCM outperforms competing mechanisms. It maintains higher throughput as the number of participating nodes increases and achieves a throughput approximately 10.78% higher than ReCon. Moreover, runtime analysis demonstrates LRBCM's scalability, surpassing ReCon by approximately 12.79% with equivalent nodes and transactions. In addition, as a combination of LRBCM, the proposed distributed lightweight authentication mechanism (ELAM) is rigorously evaluated against the security of various attacks, and its resilience is confirmed. Experiments show that ELAM has good efficiency while maintaining high security.