A decentralized blockchain-based authentication scheme for cross-communication in IoT networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionising our everyday life by connecting a massive number of smart objects. IoT is considered a key enabler of multiple emerging applications in several areas such as manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, automotive, smart city, etc. However, as it becomes increasingly prevalent in our life, IoT brings a number of challenging new security risks. The first issue is related to device authentication, especially with the massive number of connected devices with different types (sensors, vehicles, drones, etc.). This issue can be exploited by attackers to break into IoT networks. In addition, IoT devices generate a huge amount of confidential data that must be processed and transmitted independently without human intervention, which cannot be performed by traditional centralized security systems. Besides, the isolation imposed between different networks and the number of messages used for device's association are considered the main limitations in the two recent works. To overcome these limits, we design a novel decentralized scheme leveraging a hybridization of two main types of blockchain, local and public, which ensures authentication of things before establishing communication and exchanging information between devices. Our solution removes the isolation between different networks, contributes in reducing the number of messages required for the association phase, and solves the time delay problem imposed by the PoW consensus mechanism that is used in public blockchain as well. We adopt the Ethereum blockchain in its two versions local and public to implement our solution, and evaluate its performance as compared to the existing literature. The obtained results proved its effectiveness in terms of execution time and energy consumption which are the same metrics used in the most recent works.

Automated summary

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming everyday life by connecting a large number of smart objects across various fields. However, the increasing prevalence of IoT brings security risks, particularly in device authentication and handling confidential data. To address these challenges, a novel decentralized scheme leveraging a hybridization of local and public blockchains is proposed. This scheme eliminates network isolation, reduces the number of messages required for device association, and solves the time delay problem caused by the PoW consensus mechanism. The proposal utilizes Ethereum blockchain in both local and public versions and demonstrates effectiveness in terms of execution time and energy consumption.