A Lightweight Blockchain-Based Cross-Domain Authentication and Data Sharing Scheme for the Industrial Internet of Things

In the current context of cross-domain identity authentication and data sharing for industrial Internet of things (IIoT) devices, edge servers and blockchain technology play vital roles in enabling rapid data forwarding and secure storage. Existing mechanisms for cross-domain authentication and data sharing are facing a range of security risks, and are further challenged by high computational and communication overhead at the device level, as well as by overly complex authentication structures. To address these problems, we propose a lightweight cross-domain authentication and data sharing scheme based on blockchain technology, specifically designed for IIoT scenarios. The proposed scheme enables anonymous cross-domain authentication and secure data sharing for industrial devices. Furthermore, we introduce a distributed key generation mechanism to construct service keys. Based on service keys, a lightweight message authentication algorithm is designed to ensure the confidentiality of service-related information at the device side, while minimizing resource consumption to the greatest extent. A detailed security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme satisfies the critical security properties of unforgeability, confidentiality, unlinkability, and anonymity. In addition, performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared with existing solutions in terms of computational overhead, communication cost, and the efficiency of blockchain query operations.