Blockchain-Assisted Flexible Revocable Anonymous Authentication in Industrial Internet of Things

In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems, data sharing between industrial departments is often utilized to optimize management models and improve decision-making efficiency. To enable secure data sharing, authentication between smart devices is critical. However, existing authentication schemes do not comprehensively consider data anonymity, data traceability, pseudonym management, and flexible revocation of devices, which cannot meet the needs of IIoT systems for security, real-time, and dynamicity. Therefore, we propose a blockchain-assisted lightweight authentication scheme. First, we design a lightweight authentication method based on Okamoto's protocol and elliptic curve cryptography, which achieves fast authentication of smart devices while ensuring data anonymity and traceability. Second, we design a two-level key derivation algorithm and combine it with blockchain technology to address the issue of pseudonym management. Smart devices can generate pseudonyms without requesting them from the key generation center and can be revoked flexibly. Third, security proof and analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the security objectives and is resistant to various common attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation results show that our proposed scheme performs better than the other related schemes regarding computational and communication overheads.