Hybrid blockchain-based many-to-many cross-domain authentication scheme for smart agriculture IoT networks

Abstract

With the development of smart agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) projects, the need for extensive collaboration among agricultural devices from different domains has surged, necessitating the authentication of device identities for secure communication. Existing centralized architecture-dependent authentication mechanisms encounter issues like a sole point of failure and inefficiencies. Most authentication schemes are unable to support plentiful devices synchronously connecting to numerous data servers in other domains. To address these problems, we propose a many-to-many cross-domain authentication scheme based on the hybrid blockchain architecture for smart agriculture IoT networks. The scheme enables multiple devices simultaneously executing mutual authentication with several data service providers from other agricultural systems. This paper designs a groupable batch verification (GBV) algorithm that dynamically adjusts the batch size by performing group verification for a list of requests, enhancing the flexibility of cross-domain batch authentication. Furthermore, the proposed scheme provides a pseudonym update mechanism to protect the privacy of devices and guards services of different domains from illegal access by tracking malicious devices. The security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme has superior security features and performance.

Keywords

• Cross-domain authentication
• Blockchain
• Batch verification
• Smart agriculture IoT networks
• Certificateless cryptography (CLC)