A Cross-Domain Authentication Key Agreement Protocol for Edge Computing

With the rapid development of edge computing in the Industrial Internet, data sharing schemes among edge users require reliable cross-domain authentication and key agreement mechanisms to guarantee the security and reliability of inter-device communication. To tackle the deficiencies of existing group key agreement schemes, including dependence on trusted third parties, high computational overhead, and the difficulty of achieving both privacy preservation and attack resistance, this paper presents a cross-domain authenticated key agreement protocol designed for edge computing environments. This protocol supports anonymous identity authentication between cross-domain users, and innovatively constructs a multi-dimensional virtual iterative cyberspace model to generate massive secure keys via the collaborative iteration of multi-user key sequences. The proposed protocol is decentralized, lightweight, and resistant to replay attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks, while satisfying forward and backward secrecy. Security analysis and performance comparison experiments illustrate that the protocol significantly reduces computational and communication overhead, matches the resource-constrained characteristics of edge devices, and can be widely deployed in large-scale data encryption and sharing scenarios under edge computing environments.