Blockchain-based Privacy-preserving Authentication Key Agreement Protocol for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) are indispensable for Industry 4.0. However, limited to the resource of sensor nodes, designing an effective and secure authentication protocol for real-time data access in IWSNs is full of challenges. In addition, existing protocols fail to balance security and performance for real-time access to IWSNs simultaneously. Thus, we design an efficient authentication key agreement protocol using the physical unclonable function (PUF), elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and smart contract. We perform formal security analysis under the random oracle model and demonstrate that our protocol meets the basic requirements. Rinkeby, an online Ethereum test network, is used to test the smart contract. Finally, we evaluate computation, communication and storage costs with several similar protocols. The results show that our protocol can provide a higher level of security and the lowest storage cost.