Blockchain-Based Lightweight Message Authentication for Edge-Assisted Cross-Domain Industrial Internet of Things

In edge-assisted cross-domain Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), blockchain-based authentication is an effective way to build cross-domain trust and secure cross-domain data. However, existing authentication schemes still have serious challenges in terms of efficiency and security. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based lightweight message authentication scheme. First, to address efficiency challenges, we build a blockchain-enabled edge-assisted lightweight authentication framework. This framework uses edge servers to assist smart devices in achieving cross-domain authentication and effectively reduce redundant interactions between entities. Second, to resolve the security challenges, we design a lightweight message authentication algorithm for cross-domain IIoT. The algorithm guarantees message security with low computational overhead and is suitable for multi-receiver cross-domain IIoT. The security proof and analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure under the random oracle model and can resist various attacks. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed scheme is superior in terms of computation and communication overhead when compared with other related schemes.