A Lightweight Cross-Domain Proximity-Based Authentication Method for IoT Based on IOTA

Nowadays, electronic industry witnesses a massive explosion of offering Internet of Things (IoT) devices with cellular technology to the market for machinery type communication (MTC). Due to usually unmanned deployments, MTC requires authentication for security reasons before exchanging actual information. Today, IoT cross-domain authentication executed at a blockchain backend side is well studied. However, lightweight proximity-based authentication for cross-domain IoT devices is still lack of consideration. In this paper, we show the first attempt to solve this problem based on IOTA blockchain technology. Specifically, our solution benefits both from the advantages of IOTA blockchain and the capabilities of mobile edge computing (MEC) so that a lightweight authentication procedure can be achieved by reducing involvements of the heavy backend side. A small in-house prototype system is implemented in order to validate the feasibility of the proposed solution.