Zero trust in edge computing environment: a blockchain based practical scheme

Abstract

Edge computing offloads the data processing capacity to the user side, provides flexible and efficient computing services for the development of smart city, and brings many security challenges. Aiming at the problems of fuzzy boundary security protection and dynamic identity authentication in the edge computing environment in smart city, the zero trust architecture based on blockchain is studied, and a digital identity model and dynamic authentication scheme of edge computing nodes based on distributed ledger are proposed. Firstly, a digital identity model of two-way authentication between edge computing node and sensing terminal is established to realize fine-grained authorization and access control in edge computing. Secondly, based on the identity data and behavior log bookkeeping on the chain, the quantification of trust value, trust transmission and update are realized, and the traceability of security events is improved. Finally, based on the improved RAFT consensus algorithm, the multi-party consensus and consistency accounting in the authentication process are realized. Simulation results show that this scheme can meet the requirements of zero trust verification in edge computing environment, and has good efficiency and robustness.

Keywords

• blockchain
• internet of things
• zero trust
• edge computing
• secret sharing
• consensus algorithm