Blockchain-Based Decentralized Authentication Modeling Scheme in Edge and IoT Environment

Authentication is the first entrance to kinds of information systems; however, traditional centered single-side authentication is weak and fragile, which has security risk of single-side failure or breakdown caused by outside attacks or internal cheating. In the edge and Internet-of-Things (IoT) environment, blockchain can apply edge devices to better serve the IoT and provide decentralized high security service solutions. In this article, we proposed a blockchain-based decentralized authentication modeling scheme (named BlockAuth) in edge and IoT environment to provide a more secure, reliable, and strong fault tolerance novel solution, in which each edge device is regarded as a node to form a blockchain network. We designed secure registration and authentication strategy, blockchain-based decentralized authentication protocol, and developed the blockchain consensus, smart contract, and implemented a whole blockchain-based authentication platform for the feasibility, security, and performance evaluation. The analysis and evaluation show that the proposed BlockAuth scheme provides a more secure, reliable, and strong fault tolerance decentralized novel authentication with high-level security driven configuration management. The proposed BlockAuth scheme is suitable for password-based, certificate-based, biotechnology-based, and token-based authentication for high-level security requirement system in edge and IoT environment.