AcBF: A Revocable Blockchain-Based Identity Management Enabling Low-Latency Authentication

Blockchain-based identity brings in great evolution due to its decentralized deployment, transparent and tamper-free ledger. Specification groups of B5G/6G are exploring into integrate the technology to future network systems, e.g., Internet of Things, vehicular network, industrial communications. However, devices in these systems often have storage constraints and unstable channels, which necessitates lightweight node deployment. The security issue arises: revoked identity can forge a legitimate authentication, since the lightweight verifier does not maintain the revocation transactions. This paper hence proposes AcBF, a novel revocable identity management scheme, that enables extremely low authentication latency by allowing the lightweight node to query the certificate's status locally. To realize this feature trustfully, we design a revocation transaction based on accumulator-assisted Bloom filter to minimize the storage of certificate status structure. Secondly, we construct the blockchain protocol to ensure that no revocation event slips on any lightweight ledger, even in an insecure or unstable communication environment. In addition, different from other revocation mechanisms, AcBF minimizes the impact on valid users during the revocation process. Through security and performance analysis, AcBF has shown strong security and advantageous efficiency on both lightweight verifiers and certificate owners, thus suits identity management systems with low-latency constraints.