A distributed identity management and cross-domain authentication scheme for the Internet of Things

Reliable identity management and authentication are prerequisites for secure information communication. Traditional centralized schemes rely on the Certificate Authority (CA), and their cross-domain authentication is complex, posing a risk of centralized data leakage. The advancement of blockchain technology has disrupted the traditional model, leading to the emergence of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) management and authentication schemes. However, the widespread adoption of SSI still faces some challenges, such as key loss and the inefficiency of MerkleTree verification. Therefore, we propose an improved distributed identity management and cross-domain authentication scheme for the Internet of Things (IoT). In this scheme, a key creation and recovery mechanism is first proposed to prevent identity unavailability caused by key loss. Then, a double one-way accumulator algorithm is designed to improve identity authentication and enhance the authentication efficiency. Our scheme has passed formal and informal security analyses, and has robust performance.