Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based Multifactor Device Authentication Protocol for Cross-Domain IIoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged as a prospective technology that improves the productivity and automation level for industrial applications. Devices from cooperative IIoT domains will communicate and collaborate on the increasingly complicated manufacturing tasks. To secure cross-domain device collaborations, we propose combining the blockchain with multifactor authentication. Because the multifactor authentication conforms to IIoT devices’ operation modes and brings higher security levels, and the blockchain technology contributes to building trust among different domains. However, this combined usage still has limitations in terms of the potential loss of factor attack, the storage overhead on the blockchain, and the contradiction between efficiency and privacy preservation. Motivated by these facts, in this article, we develop a privacy-preserving blockchain-based multifactor device authentication protocol for cross-domain IIoT. Specifically, multiple factors are additionally encoded by the hardware fingerprint into random numbers, before being transformed into key materials. The blockchain only stores each domain’s dynamic accumulator, which accumulates derived key materials for devices, thereby reducing the overhead. Moreover, the on-chain accumulator is leveraged to efficiently verify the unlinkable identities of cross-domain IIoT devices. The security of our protocol is formally proved, and the security features and functionalities are, respectively, discussed. A proof-of-concept prototype was implemented to prove the efficiency and reliability. The comparison results indicate that the on-chain storage is greatly reduced. Finally, the smart contract’s performance was evaluated to show scalability.