A Traceable Cross-Domain Anonymous Authentication Scheme in Industrial Internet of Things
Yaobo Xie, Weihao Liu, Yuxin Wang · 2025
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become essential for enhancing industrial productivity and automation, enabling inter connectivity and intelligent collaboration among devices by linking physical devices, sensors, and control systems. However, with the deployment of IIoT devices across multiple domains, challenges like identity authentication, privacy protection, and efficient certificate retrieval have arisen. This paper proposes a blockchain-based traceable cross-domain anonymous authentication scheme to address these issues. The scheme generates anonymous credentials for IIoT devices, protecting their real identities during communication. Additionally, use Merkle tree-based information retrieval system and cross-domain authentication certificates, enabling low-latency verification and management. Blockchain technology ensures certificate integrity and transparency while preventing single points of failure and data forgery. When malicious devices appear, trusted authorities can revoke blockchain-stored certificates via the retrieval mechanism and trace device identities. Formal security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the scheme provides high security with low computational and communication overhead, making it suitable for resource-constrained IIoT environments.