From Centralized to Decentralized: A DID-based Authentication Concept in Forestry 4.0

The ability of Internet of Things (IoT) systems to authenticate users and devices is regarded as a crucial defense mechanism in today's IoT cybersecurity. It serves as a basis for the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and services in the IoT world. In European forest-based sector, a number of cutting-edge digital solutions from Industry 4.0 are being integrated to establish new concepts for digitized and value-added chains in various fields. In this context, the term Forestry 4.0 has been derived. There, authentication is a keyword to ensure IoT security. Decentralized authentication solutions provide several advantages over a centralized one, such as avoiding a single point of failure, enabling cross-domain usage, and ensuring data sovereignty. Nevertheless, the forest-based sector has not adopted any decentralized authentication techniques due to the particular nature of this sector until now. Hence, in this paper, we discuss the potential of using Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) in Forestry 4.0. In addition, we propose our decentralized authentication architecture using the W3C DID core model. We also introduce the concept of self-sovereign Things, which are distinct classes with varying levels of autonomy over their identity and data-access policies.