BLECA: A Blockchain-Based Lightweight and Efficient Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme for Smart Parks

Smart parks serve as integral components of smart cities, where they play a pivotal role in the process of urban modernization. The demand for cross-domain cooperation among smart devices from various parks has witnessed a significant increase. To ensure secure communication, device identities must undergo authentication. The existing cross-domain authentication schemes face issues such as complex authentication paths and high certificate management costs for devices, making it impractical for resource-constrained devices. This paper proposes a blockchain-based lightweight and efficient cross-domain authentication protocol for smart parks, which simplifies the authentication interaction and requires every device to maintain only one certificate. To enhance cross-domain cooperation flexibility, a comprehensive certificate revocation mechanism is presented, significantly reducing certificate management costs while ensuring efficient and secure identity authentication. When a park needs to revoke access permissions of several cooperative partners, the revocation of numerous cross-domain certificates can be accomplished with a single blockchain write operation. The security analysis and experimental results demonstrate the security and effectiveness of our scheme.