A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Awareness Authentication Scheme with Efficient Revocation for Multi-Server Architectures

Multi-server authentication technology has become more and more popular with the extensive applications of networks. Although it has brought great convenience to people's life, security becomes a critical issue and attracts lots of attentions in both academia and industry. Over the past two decades, a series of multi-server authentication schemes without communication with the online registration center in each authentication phase using the self-certified public key cryptography have been proposed to enhance security. However, it may cause the single-point failure problem due to the centralized architecture. Besides, user revocation facility is not well resolved in these schemes. To the best of our knowledge, blockchain technology has lots of advantages, bringing a promising solution to the problems of single-point failure and user revocation compared with the traditional cryptography technologies. In this work, we apply the idea of blockchain technology to construct a privacy-awareness authentication scheme for the multi-server environment, which can achieve distributed registry and efficient revocation. Moreover, the proposed scheme not only provides multiple security requirements like mutual authentication, user anonymity and perfect forward secrecy, but also resists various kinds of malicious attacks. The security of the proposed scheme is proved by rigorous formal proof using the random oracle model. Compared with recently related schemes, the proposed scheme has better communication performance, which make it be very suitable for real-life applications.