A blockchain-based provably secure anonymous authentication for edge computing-enabled IoT

Edge computing server deployed at the edge of the network has promoted the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) but also brings some security problems. Traditional IoT security solutions have not met the requirements of the current rapid growth of equipment, real-time and lightweight. Therefore, the development of new authentication and key agreement is becoming an important means to solve the security problems of the IoT. To address this challenge, we propose an authentication framework for the edge computing-enabled IoT environment. This framework aims to facilitate the establishment of secure communication among devices and between devices and edge servers. This authentication framework achieves secure communication and identity verification among edge computing-enabled IoT devices and between devices and edge servers by incorporating a portion of the local private key during registration and leveraging a distributed blockchain network. Formal and informal security analyses of the proposed protocol show that the protocol effectively responds to numerous security threats while satisfying various security attributes. In addition, the study provides a comprehensive assessment of the computational and transmission overheads associated with the protocol. The results show that the protocol's commendable performance in terms of both computational efficiency and transmission cost-effectiveness.