A Privacy-Aware Cross-Domain Device Authentication Scheme for IIoT Based on Blockchain

Abstract

With the increasing cross-factory cooperation in manufacturing, the communication between Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices from discrete domains (e.g., indepen-dent factories) has become common. Authentication schemes are widely adopted to secure device-to-device communications. However, most existing schemes directly use the real identities of IIoT devices for communication and even publish them onto a publicly available blockchain. It allows attackers to easily identify devices, relate them with specific factories owned them, and further extract the factories' private information. To address this issue, we propose a privacy-aware cross-domain authentication scheme for IIoT devices based on blockchain. In the proposed scheme, IIoT devices use different pseudonyms for each session instead of their real identities to maintain anonymity and un-linkability. Besides, the proposed certificateless signature scheme can eliminate the reliance on certificates that might expose the ownership of devices. We also proposed an identity management mechanism to realize identity revocation and malicious device tracking. The security analysis and performance evaluation results show that our scheme is feasible and efficient for cross-domain authentication.