BCAE: A Blockchain-Based Cross Domain Authentication Scheme for Edge Computing

With the vigorous development of the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile users need to access data from other domains in edge computing. To achieve secure data sharing, mobile users first need to be authenticated by servers from different domains and then negotiate session keys among them. However, traditional schemes cannot solve cross-domain identity authentication and key agreement problems well due to the limited computational resources of IoT devices. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based cross-domain authentication scheme for Edge computing, namely, BCAE. First, to achieve secure identity verification, we design a novel cross-domain mutual identity authentication algorithm based on digital certificates and digital signatures. Next, to improve efficiency, we utilize the blockchain to share information among different domains to reduce the computation overhead. To realize quick key agreement, we apply the elliptic curve cryptography technique to design a lightweight key agreement algorithm and obtain secure session keys. Extensive experiments conducted on an actual smart healthcare issue to validate the performance of BCAE and formal security analysis confirmed the potential of the proposed work.