Blockchain-Based Anonymous Authentication and Key Management for Internet of Things With Chebyshev Chaotic Maps

In Industry 5.0, there are increasing demands for group communication with low energy consumption and high communication efficiency from a great number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, group communication is still exposed to various security risks. Although some cryptographic schemes have been devised to facilitate secure group communication, the existing schemes generally rely on a trust authority to periodically issue certificates and have led to various issues, such as failing to support anonymity and flexible key management, and cannot resist the single point of failure. Therefore, in this work, leveraging Chebyshev chaotic maps and blockchain, an anonymous authentication and key management scheme is proposed to provide secure and efficient group key generation and management for mutual authentication between communication entities. The scheme exploits the blockchain to save the key materials associated with IoT devices, thereby it ensures data privacy and provides a secure environment for communication. The scheme also employs the Chebyshev polynomial to generate a group key for the IoT devices within a group, and later the group members holding the same group key can use it for secure communication. The formal and informal security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme can meet the security and flexible key management requirements. The detailed performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme has acceptable computation and communication energy consumption and provides superior security in comparison with existing schemes.