Blockchain-Based Certificateless Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme in the Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consists of massive devices in different management domains, and the lack of trust among cross-domain entities leads to risks of data security and privacy leakage during information exchange. To address the above challenges, a viable solution that combines Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) with blockchain technology can be utilized. However, as many existing schemes rely on a single Key Generation Center (KGC), they are prone to problems such as single points of failure and high computational overhead. In this case, this paper proposes a novel blockchain-based certificateless cross-domain authentication scheme, that integrates the threshold secret sharing mechanism without a trusted center, meanwhile, adopts blockchain technology to enable cross-domain entities to authenticate with each other and to negotiate session keys securely. This scheme also supports the dynamic joining and removing of multiple KGCs, ensuring secure and efficient cross-domain authentication and key negotiation. Comparative analysis with other protocols demonstrates that the proposed cross-domain authentication protocol can achieve high security with relatively low computational overhead. Moreover, this paper evaluates the scheme based on Hyperledger Fabric blockchain environment and simulates the performance of the certificateless scheme under different threshold parameters, and the simulation results show that the scheme has high performance.