Efficient and Anonymous Cross-Domain Authentication for IIoT Based on Blockchain

The rapid development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has realized the intelligence of industrial manufacturing and improved production efficiency. For improved collaboration, devices from different management domains (e.g., factories) connected through various communication technologies exchange information and share resources. However, they face security and privacy issues when cross-domain communication requires authentication. The limitations of existing schemes include the risk of a single point of failure in a trusted center, leakage of device privacy, high certificate management costs, and low authentication efficiency. Because blockchain with features such as decentralization and tamper-proof can effectively solve some of these problems, we design an efficient and anonymous cross-domain authentication scheme based on blockchain to achieve reliable communication between cross-domain IIoT devices. Specifically, our scheme improves authentication efficiency while enabling device anonymity to ensure that identities are not linkable, and combines blockchain and dynamic accumulator technology to achieve fast authentication. Security analysis demonstrates that our scheme can resist common attacks, and a performance evaluation proves its feasibility and efficiency.