A blockchain based secure authentication technique for ensuring user privacy in edge based smart city networks

Abstract

In the past decade, modernization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Edge Computing (EC), and Smart Cities has attracted significant academic interest due to its diverse applications in the fields of healthcare, transportation, agriculture, and defense. EC offers numerous advantages, including faster and more efficient services, lower latency, improved data processing, managed bandwidth consumption, scalable, real-time decision-making, security, reduced network congestion, and increased resilience. Despite these benefits, EC networks face persistent challenges, particularly related to security and privacy concerns. Addressing these security challenges requires strong authentication mechanisms, which demand extra resources like processing power and memory, often surpassing the limited capabilities of lightweight edge devices compared to cloud systems. This highlights the critical need for securing edge nodes and ensuring user privacy before real-world deployment and data transfer. User and edge device authentication is vital to prevent external and internal Impersonation and Reflection attacks that threaten system integrity and confidentiality. This paper presents a BlockChain based Authentication technique for Edge Networks (BCAuthEN) that utilizes a Consortium Blockchain (CB) with key agreements for biometric authentication, incorporating a Fuzzy Extractor (FE) to secure user biometrics and passwords. In addition, BCAuthEN offers multifactor and continuous authentication by monitoring user behavior and biometrics. BCAuthEN has been formally verified through Real-Or-Random (RoR) modeling and AVISPA tool, proving its effectiveness in enhancing privacy, and security. The proposed technique ensures robust security by preventing attackers at the potential entry points (edge nodes). In addition, BCAuthEN reduces computation cost, communication overhead and improves throughput. BCAuthEN provides strong resilience by achieving high detection accuracy and reduces false positives against impersonation and reflection attacks. Results have shown that BCAuthEN improves communication costs and reduces overhead by 10% and 7%, respectively, as compared to the recent biometric and key-based user authentication techniques.