A Lightweight Blockchain Authentication for Digital Twin Satellite networks in Metaverse Connectivity

With the growing adoption of metaverse access devices, traditional terrestrial communication networks have become a performance bottleneck. To address this challenge, we integrate the Digital Twin Satellite Network (DTSN) into metaverse infrastructure and propose a cloud-edge collaborative architecture that enables efficient processing of edge-collected user data while enhancing system resilience and scalability. However, the open nature of satellite networks exposes DTSN relay nodes to sophisticated security threats. To mitigate these risks, we design a lightweight blockchain-based authentication protocol that leverages dynamic key negotiation to optimize the distribution of computational load between satellites and Digital Twins (DTs), reducing the burden on satellites while improving overall efficiency. The security of the proposed protocol is formally verified using Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and performance evaluations based on computational and communication costs demonstrate its superiority over existing metaverse authentication schemes.