SECURE USER AUTHENTICATION AND KEY AGREEMENT IN SMART NETWORKS WITH BLOCKCHAIN GATEWAYS

As IoT-driven smart environments such as intelligent cities, buildings, and industries develop quickly, user authentication is becoming increasingly important to guard against illegal access and guarantee data security. Because of issues such as device heterogeneity, computing resource limitations, and potential single points of failure, conventional and current authentication methods frequently fail to overcome security issues such as impersonation, replaying, and denial-of-service attacks in IoT networks. With the goal of offering lightweight, secure, and decentralized user authentication and key agreement in smart settings, this study suggests a blockchain-based user authentication and secure key agreement protocol for smart networks. In this case, gateway nodes are permitted to create a blockchain to authenticate users and IoT nodes by integrating cryptographic hash algorithms. The AVISPA tool is used to formally verify a protocol’s security. The comparison analysis reveals that our protocol has an execution time of 0.0858 ms, confirming its performance against more recent research efforts.