Blockchain-based Authentication Research Articles

A Blockchain-Based Authentication Scheme and Secure Architecture for IoT-Enabled Maritime Transportation Systems

Although modern Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) have been extensively benefited from Internet of Things (IoT) technology, but still the risks and challenges in safety and reliability have increased substantially. The involvement of different maritime parties in the marine transportation flow scheduling and management further escalates these challenges. Thus, we need an IoT-based collaborative processing system that unifies the modular structure and integrates multiple modules involved in MTS. Moreover, the need for a shared and controlled access mechanism that cannot be manipulated or tampered by unauthorized parties is also essential requirement in MTS. Blockchain, as an emerging technology, has become a key tool in data security protection because of its non-tampering and non-forgery characteristics. Keeping in view of this aspect, in this paper, an IoT-based collaborative processing system based on blockchain is proposed for marine transportation flow scheduling and management. In addition, we propose a novel consensus mechanism based on Verifiable Random Function (VRF) and reputation voting to reduce the communication cost in blockchain consensus communication process. The proposed scheme has been validated in a simulated environment and the results illustrate that the scheme has obvious effect in resisting replay attack and camouflage attack. Furthermore, the optimized consensus mechanism improves the security by 8% and the transaction processing speed by 6% on the premise that the communication cost is basically unchanged.

An energy harvesting, blockchain, and QoS-aware intelligent healthcare task coordination policy for IoT-assisted networks

With the rise of advanced communication technology, mobile devices, cloud computing, and internet of things (IoT) technology, a significant amount of IoT-assisted healthcare applications have been emerged to improve the human's life quality. Most of the existing works in IoT-assisted healthcare application execution do not consider the energy harvesting, computation task allocation, trust access authentication of users, and quality of service (QoS) requirements satisfaction at the same time by investigating different healthcare users, requirements, energy cost, available cloud, and network resources. To deal with these issues, this paper proposes an intelligent energy harvesting, decentralised blockchain-based authentication, and QoS-aware healthcare task coordination scheme for IoT-assisted healthcare applications by taking into account different users, QoS requirements, resources availability, and resource cost. Simulation results on transaction delay, energy consumption, resource cost, throughput, and system reward are presented to show the significance of the proposed scheme over the conventional schemes.

A blockchain-based Fog-oriented lightweight framework for smart public vehicular transportation systems

Rapid urbanization is putting a strain on the transport systems of cities worldwide. The effects of this trend include prolonged traffic jams and increasing environmental pollution from rising CO2 emissions. As city planning requires innovative ways of dealing with the rapid urbanization trend, technological solutions were proposed such as cloud computing, smart vehicles, and Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET). In this paper, we take advantage of next-generation network technologies to propose a responsive and lightweight framework for smart transportation system which employs blockchain for authentication using fog computing’s improvement over cloud computing for distributed applications to provide an efficient and secure transportation system. We take into account the future technologies of 5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) and argue that the integration of B5G technologies, federated learning, blockchain, and edge computing provides the perfect platform necessary for a smart transportation system The evaluation of the proposed framework is done by comparing it to the current cloud-based approach in iFogSim, a popular simulation tool for fog computing research. The evaluation of blockchain-based authentication was done using a customized implementation of blockchain executed in an experimental setup. The simulation results showed that the proposed framework provides superior performance in terms of security, latency, and energy consumption of the system.

A Blockchain-Based Authentication Protocol Using Cryptocurrency Technology in LEO Satellite Networks

With the rapid development of satellite technology and the high transmission efficiency of LEO satellites, LEO satellite communication has received increasing attention. However, the frequent switching of satellite-earth links imposes a great challenge in LEO communication authentication. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a Blockchain-based Authentication Protocol Using Cryptocurrency Technology (BAPC), which solves the problem of a long pause time of satellite services caused by user access authentication in a scenario of frequent switching between satellites and ground users. First, we design three stages of the authentication process and introduce the cryptocurrency technology. Using currency transactions as the certificate of authentication improves not only the security of authentication, but also the efficiency of switching authentication. Next, in the network topology, the satellite cluster is divided into multiple regions to improve the efficiency of block consensus. Finally, the protocol is tested through extensive NS2-based simulations, and the results verify that BAPC can greatly shorten the response time of switching authentication and significantly reduce the time of block generation and the network throughput. As the number of users increases, the block generation time and network throughput can be further reduced.

BCmECC: A Lightweight Blockchain-Based Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet of Things

In this paper, targeting efficient authentication and key agreement in an IoT environment, we propose an Elliptic Curve Cryptography-(ECC) based lightweight authentication protocol called BCmECC which relies on a public blockchain to validate the users’ public key to provide desired security. We evaluate the security of the proposed protocol heuristically and validate it formally, which demonstratse the high level of the security. For the formal verification we used the widely accepted formal methods, i.e., BAN logic and the Scyther tool. In this paper we also analyse the security of recently proposed blockchain-based authentication protocols and show that this protocol does not provide the desired security against known session-specific temporary information attacks in which the adversary has access to the session’s ephemeral values and aims to retrieve the shared session key. In addition, the protocol lacks forward secrecy, in which an adversary with access to the server’s long-term secret key can retrieve the previous session keys, assuming that the adversary has already eavesdropped the transferred messages over a public channel in the target session. The proposed attacks are very efficient and their success probability is ‘1’, while the time complexity of each attack could be negligible. Besides, we show that BCmECC is secure against such attacks.

Blockchain-Based Authentication in Internet of Vehicles: A Survey.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as an advancement over the traditional Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) towards achieving a more efficient intelligent transportation system that is capable of providing various intelligent services and supporting different applications for the drivers and passengers on roads. In order for the IoV and VANETs environments to be able to offer such beneficial road services, huge amounts of data are generated and exchanged among the different communicated entities in these vehicular networks wirelessly via open channels, which could attract the adversaries and threaten the network with several possible types of security attacks. In this survey, we target the authentication part of the security system while highlighting the efficiency of blockchains in the IoV and VANETs environments. First, a detailed background on IoV and blockchain is provided, followed by a wide range of security requirements, challenges, and possible attacks in vehicular networks. Then, a more focused review is provided on the recent blockchain-based authentication schemes in IoV and VANETs with a detailed comparative study in terms of techniques used, network models, evaluation tools, and attacks counteracted. Lastly, some future challenges for IoV security are discussed that are necessary to be addressed in the upcoming research.

Blockchain-Based Authentication with Optional Privacy Preservation for Internet of Vehicles

With the rapid development of the mobile internet and intelligent technology of in-vehicle equipment, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), centered on intelligent connected cars, has gradually entered people’s lives. However, these technologies also bring serious privacy risks and security issues in terms of data transmission and storage. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based authentication system to provide vehicle safety management. The privacy and security attributes of various vehicle authentication transactions are based on high-level cryptographic primitives, realizing temporary and formal authentication methods. At the same time, a fair blockchain consensus mechanism Auction of block generation Rights (AoR) is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the proposed scheme, security and performance analyses are presented. The relevant experimental results show that the scheme can provide superior decentralized management for IoV.

An Efficient Blockchain-Based Authentication Scheme for Energy-Trading in V2G Networks

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks have been emerged as a new technology in the smart grid (SG). These networks allow a two-way flow of energy-trading between electric vehicles (EVs) and charging stations (CSs) in the SG. EVs are regarded as one of the most effective tools to reduce energy demands. It will bring a great impact on our society and human life. Thus, during energy trading between EVs and CSs, various security, and privacy challenges occur in V2G networks. Although several proposals have been proposed, still there are many issues like lack of integrity, mutual authentication, and identity privacy-preservation make the system more vulnerable. Researchers have used the centralized system in V2G networks which may act as a single point of failure. So, for deploying secure V2G networks in the SG, we propose an energy-trading scheme having blockchain between three communicating parties, i.e., EVs, CSs, utility center. The proposed system is divided into three phases, first, the registration process provides identity privacy-preservation to the EVs and CSs, second, the searching process makes the registration and key-generation steps faster, and third, the authentication process provides mutual authentication between them and a blockchain network is used to execute transactions using Merkle Root Hash. The security analysis result shows that the proposed scheme is secure for energy-trading in V2G networks. The performance evaluation results illustrate that our scheme has less communication cost and computation time as compared to the existing proposals.

Build a Secure Smart City by using Blockchain and Digital Twin

Background/Objectives: As urbanization increases worldwide, so do the need for smart cities that enable more efficient city management. Based on smart city operational data, it explains the digital twin technologies required to predict outcomes and control according to circumstances through virtual simulations and presents related metaverse technologies. Methods/Statistical analysis: Introduction and explanation of smart city services using blockchain. The data infrastructure underlies each area, such as city operations, essential in a smart city. Findings: Therefore, blockchain is used to avoid hacking, data errors, and system failures of the existing centralized management and ensure data integrity and system stability by building a more secure server. In addition, blockchain enables the establishment of governance and free access to information through individual information sovereignty. Improvements/Applications: Most smart city models do not have a high level of authentication. Therefore, this study investigated a new smart city model that provides security and convenience to citizens by mutually complementing the virtual and real worlds by predicting urban situations through digital twins that can simulate impossible conditions in reality based on blockchain-based authentication.

An Unlinkable Authenticated Key Agreement With Collusion Resistant for VANETs

Anonymous authentication is an important step to protect vehicular privacy and security in VANETs. To improve the efficiency of anonymous authentication in multiple security domains, VANETs integrated with blockchain attracts extensive attention. However, the existing blockchain-based authentication schemes cannot effectively achieve anonymity because colluded RSUs or vehicles can achieve linkability via the same retrieved record to destroy anonymity. To address the issue, we propose an unlinkable authenticated key agreement with collusion resistant for VANETs. For the unlinkability of V2R, firstly, a trusted authority generates multiple tickets that hide the vehicle's identity and shares them by the blockchain network. Then, vehicle generates different pseudonyms by homomorphic encryption, and RSU uses different tickets to authenticate them. Meanwhile, in view of the unlinkability of the V2V, anonymous authenticated key agreement based on homomorphic properties is designed to enable vehicles to achieve authentication without retrieving any vehicular information. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme has strict unlinkability and enhanced anonymity as well as improves the efficiency of V2R and V2V by 10% and 50%, respectively.

Design and Implementation of Digital Education Resources Blockchain-Based Authentication System

With the approaching of the digital age, digital education resources bring convenience to folks as a result of they're liable to duplicate and spread, however there are some disadvantages in on-line education service transactions. The safety problems with digital education resources and also the development of smuggled distribution seriously harm the rights and interests of the house owners of digital education resources. supported this, during this paper, we have a tendency to planned a blockchain-based digital education resources authentication system that uses the decentralized, tamper-resistant options of blockchain technology to store the digital education resources info within the style of a secret text. Within the system, there is no have to be compelled to need the participation of any third-party institution. The system planned during this study can greatly defend the rights and interests of the owner of digital education resources.

Powerful authentication regime applicable to naval OFP integrated development (PARANOID): a vision for non-circumventable code signing and traceability for embedded avionics software

Purpose This paper aims to describe an effort to provide for a robust and secure software development paradigm intended to support DevSecOps in a naval aviation enterprise (NAE) software support activity (SSA), with said paradigm supporting strong traceability and provability concerning the SSA’s output product, known as an operational flight program (OFP). Through a secure development environment (SDE), each critical software development function performed on said OFP during its development has a corresponding record represented on a blockchain. Design/methodology/approach An SDE is implemented as a virtual machine or container incorporating software development tools that are modified to support blockchain transactions. Each critical software development function, e.g. editing, compiling, linking, generates a blockchain transaction message with associated information embedded in the output of a said function that, together, can be used to prove integrity and support traceability. An attestation process is used to provide proof that the toolchain containing SDE is not subject to unauthorized modification at the time said critical function is performed. Findings Blockchain methods are shown to be a viable approach for supporting exhaustive traceability and strong provability of development system integrity for mission-critical software produced by an NAE SSA for NAE embedded systems software. Practical implications A blockchain-based authentication approach that could be implemented at the OFP point-of-load would provide for fine-grain authentication of all OFP software components, with each component or module having its own proof-of-integrity (including the integrity of the used development tools) over its entire development history. Originality/value Many SSAs have established control procedures for development such as check-out/check-in. This does not prove the SSA output software is secure. For one thing, a build system does not necessarily enforce procedures in a way that is determinable from the output. Furthermore, the SSA toolchain itself could be attacked. The approach described in this paper enforces security policy and embeds information into the output of every development function that can be cross-referenced to blockchain transaction records for provability and traceability that only trusted tools, free from unauthorized modifications, are used in software development. A key original concept of this approach is that it treats assigned developer time as a transferable digital currency.

A Blockchain-Based Hierarchical Authentication Scheme for Multiserver Architecture

In a multiserver architecture, authentication schemes play an important role in the secure communication of the system. In many multiserver authentication schemes, the security of the mutual authentications among the participants is based on the security of the registration center’s private key. This centralized architecture can create security risks due to the leakage of the registration center’s private key. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized, tamper-proof, and distributed features, can provide a new solution for multiserver authentication schemes. In a lot of multiserver authentication schemes, users’ permission is generally controlled by the registration center (RC), but these permission control methods cannot be applied in the decentralized blockchain system. In this paper, a blockchain-based authentication scheme for multiserver architecture is proposed. Our scheme provides a hierarchical authentication method to solve the problems of user permission control and user revocation caused by no registration center. The security of our scheme is formally proved under the random oracle model. According to our analysis, our scheme is resistant to attacks such as impersonation attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme has less computation overhead.

BPAF: Blockchain-Enabled Reliable and Privacy-Preserving Authentication for Fog-Based IoT Devices

The development of IoT and fog computing promotes various kinds of authentication mechanisms for IoT devices. Traditional IoT authentication schemes are based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) where a centralized certificate authority is introduced. To mitigate the security, privacy, and reliability issues bring from the centralization, some blockchain-based authentication schemes have been presented to achieve decentralized authentication. Unfortunately, they cannot be directly used under the fog-based IoT environment, which consists of resource-constrained IoT devices. To mitigate these issues, we present a Blockchain-enabled reliable, and Privacy-preserving Authentication for Fog-based IoT devices, named BPAF. BPAF achieves reliable authentication of fog nodes without violating the privacy of authenticated users during the authentication process. Security analysis and experimental evaluations show that BPAF achieves privacy-preserving and reliable authentication with high efficiency for both the fog nodes and full nodes participating in the authentication process.

Decentralized blockchain based authentication for secure data sharing in Cloud-IoT

Cloud integrated Internet of Things (Cloud-IoT) has gained huge attention over this decade. As millions of devices are connected over the internet, security becomes a more challenging issue in the Cloud-IoT environment. Many research works have contributed to ensuring security in Cloud-IoT. But none of the works has proven its security strength and efficiency. In particular, centralized authentication and complex encryption schemes increase the overhead even for low-level security. This paper proposes a novel Decentralized Blockchain-based Security (DeBlock-Sec) scheme, which is most suitable for resource-constrained IoT environment to abridge the security issue. The overall system works upon three significant phases, (1) authentication phase, (2) data encryption phase, and (3) data retrieval phase. For authentication, we propose a novel Decentralized Blockchain-based Authentication (DBA) protocol. The DBA protocol uses multiple factors to authenticate users and devices. In the next phase, data encryption is carried on the IoT devices. As the amount of data to be encrypted is large in size, the encryption is performed in the spark environment since the confidentiality of data is vital. The data retrieval phase allows users to access the data stored in the Cloud. Dendrimer Fractal Tree Indexing is followed to minimize the searching time and the Revised Diffie-Hellman algorithm is presented for key exchange. The extensive experiments performed in Spark environment show that the proposed work achieves better performance in terms of time consumption (encryption, decryption and search), storage space, and throughput. Our proposed technique is a promising research direction for real IIoT security.

A Blockchain-Based Authentication Protocol for Cooperative Vehicular Ad Hoc Network.

The efficiency of cooperative communication protocols to increase the reliability and range of transmission for Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is proven, but identity verification and communication security are required to be ensured. Though it is difficult to maintain strong network connections between vehicles because of there high mobility, with the help of cooperative communication, it is possible to increase the communication efficiency, minimise delay, packet loss, and Packet Dropping Rate (PDR). However, cooperating with unknown or unauthorized vehicles could result in information theft, privacy leakage, vulnerable to different security attacks, etc. In this paper, a blockchain based secure and privacy preserving authentication protocol is proposed for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Blockchain is utilized to store and manage the authentication information in a distributed and decentralized environment and developed on the Ethereum platform that uses a digital signature algorithm to ensure confidentiality, non-repudiation, integrity, and preserving the privacy of the IoVs. For optimized communication, transmitted services are categorized into emergency and optional services. Similarly, to optimize the performance of the authentication process, IoVs are categorized as emergency and general IoVs. The proposed cooperative protocol is validated by numerical analyses which show that the protocol successfully increases the system throughput and decreases PDR and delay. On the other hand, the authentication protocol requires minimum storage as well as generates low computational overhead that is suitable for the IoVs with limited computer resources.

A Novel Blockchain-Based Authentication and Access Control Model for Smart Environment

A Novel Blockchain-Based Authentication and Access Control Model for Smart Environment

Authenblue: A New Authentication Protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is where almost anything can be controlled and managed remotely by means of sensors. Although the IoT evolution led to quality of life enhancement, many of its devices are insecure. The lack of robust key management systems, efficient identity authentication, low fault tolerance, and many other issues lead to IoT devices being easily targeted by attackers. In this paper we propose a new authentication protocol called Authenblue that improve the authentication process of IoT devices and Coordinators of Personal Area Network (CPANs) in an Industrial IoT (IIoT) environment. This study proposed Authenblue protocol as a new Blockchain-based authentication protocol. To enhance the authentication process and make it more secure, Authenblue modified the way of generating IIoT identifiers and the shared secret keys used by the IIoT devices to raise the efficiency of the authentication protocol. Authenblue enhance the authentication protocol that other models rely on by enhancing the approach used to generate the User Identifier (UI). The UI values changed from being static values, sensors MAC addresses, to be generated values in the inception phase. This approach makes the process of renewing the sensor keys more secure by renewing their UI values instead of changing the secret key. In this study, Authenblue has been simulated in the Network Simulator 3 (NS3). Simulation results show an improved performance compared to the related work.

Blockchain based Lebesgue interpolated Gaussian secured information sharing for pharma supply chain

Supervising the product's integrity and procedures in a multi-participant supply chain environment is a noteworthy issue. In recent years blockchain technology (BT) has made an appearance as a paramount model, as it bestows secure tracking, benchmark, and trust formation between stakeholders in a cost-efficient solution. To control the foregoing concerns, data analytics is indispensable on blockchain-based secure data and hence elevates the significance of surfacing technology Machine Learning (ML). The reliability of data and its distribution are very pivotal in ML to enhance the accuracy of results. In this paper, a blockchain-based secured information sharing method called Lebesgue IntegrableConsensus and Interpolated Gaussian Learning-based (LIC-IGL) authentication to provide pharmaceutical data integrity and security is proposed. The LIC-IGL method is split into two sections. First, validation of block is performed by applying the Lebesgue Integrable Consensus model. The second step involves the authentication process carried out by employing the Adaptive Support Vector Machine Authentication model via smart contracts. Finally, upon successful authentication, distinct products are provided between and within the blocks, therefore, ensuring secured pharmaceutical product sharing. The effectiveness of the proposed and existing methods is compared with certain parameters such as latency, authentication accuracy, and false positive rate with respect to distinct numbers of products. The results acquired from the experiments exhibit a superior execution of the proposed method upon comparison with the state-of-the-art blockchain-based authentication methods and it shows enhanced simulated results with good authentication accuracy, minimizing the latency and false positive rate.

A blockchain-based authentication scheme for the machine-to-machine communication of a cyber physical system

Today, the manner in which we communicate has greatly advanced. The technology is not just about machines, but people with technology together. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is unavoidable in the Internet of things. However, at the same time, there are more attacks against the M2M system. Therefore, a reliable and secure authentication mechanism is required. Blockchain technology is decentralized and highly secure while being tamper-proof. This protects M2M service providers by eliminating the single point of failures. This paper proposes a blockchain-based authentication scheme that uses a practical Byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT) consensus mechanism for M2M security in cyber physical systems. By implementing a blockchain to an M2M system, it provides an ID for devices on the blockchain. Simulation results have shown that the data on the chain cannot be altered. A pBFT consensus algorithm also ensures that the blockchain network is able to come to a consensus with faults.