A Multi-Blockchain Based Anonymous Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme for Industrial Internet of Things

With the widespread adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the growing complexity of industrial production processes, data interactions between IIoT domains have become increasingly frequent. Ensuring security and privacy in cross-domain authentication has thus become a critical challenge. Traditional authentication schemes face several limitations, including high computation overhead, potential privacy leakage, and vulnerability to single point of failure, making it difficult to meet the cross-domain authentication needs. To address these challenges, we propose a distributed cross-domain authentication scheme in this paper. Specifically, we first design a novel IIoT cross-domain authentication architecture based on multi-blockchain. Unlike traditional single-blockchain based architecture, this approach enables fine-grained access control for on-chain device information and provides better performance and scalability. Building on this architecture, we propose an anonymous authentication scheme utilizing Certificate-Less Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC), ensuring identity privacy for industrial devices while maintaining low authentication resource overhead. Additionally, we adopt the Merkle hash tree to construct a novel pseudonym management mechanism, which supports efficient batch pseudonym request, verification, and revocation. Finally, we demonstrate the scheme’s advantages in security and efficiency through comprehensive security analysis and performance evaluation.