Blockchain-Based Anonymous Authentication in Edge Computing Environment

Abstract

Authentication is an important requirement for the security of edge computing applications. The existing authentication schemes either frequently rely on third-party trusted authorities, leading to the security risk of user information disclosure, or have high authentication overhead, causing certain pressure on the computation and communication of lightweight terminal equipment in the edge environment. In this paper, we proposed a blockchain-based anonymous authentication scheme for edge computing environments. We first designed a blockchain-based authentication architecture to store a small number of authentication elements in the blockchain network, and provide a decentralized and trusted authentication environment to ensure device anonymity and improve the security of authentication processes. Then, an elliptic cryptographic curve-based authentication scheme is proposed. It uses the chameleon hash function to dynamically generate the authentication data according to the elements stored in the blockchain and negotiate the session key, which effectively reduces the computational overhead in the authentication process. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves a secure authentication process and effectively reduces the authentication overhead by up to 43.16% compared to three state-of-the-art schemes.