Split-Chain-Based Efficient Blockchain-Assisted Cross-Domain Authentication for IoT

The rapid advancement of networking and manufacturing technologies has facilitated the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices connecting to networks. Just like humans, these devices, spanning various domains worldwide, necessitate interconnection. Therefore, cross domain identity authentication becomes crucial to ensure secure communication and mitigate cyber threats. Blockchain, as an emerging decentralized ledger technology, has garnered widespread attention due to its ability to effectively address the issue of single point of failure in traditional cross-domain identity authentication solutions. However, most cross-domain identity authentication solutions based on blockchain are limited by their reliance on existing single-chain blockchain architectures, which significantly restricts the performance of cross-domain authentication. In this paper, we present a split-chain based efficient authentication mechanism for cross-domain IoT. Specifically, we design an innovative split-chain blockchain structure that enhances the efficiency of authentication through parallelization. Additionally, we have developed a consensus algorithm that guarantees the security and fairness of the authentication system. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that our scheme increases throughput by approximately 40% compared to MCCA, one of the most recent existing cross-domain solutions.