Blockchain Based Unified Authentication with Zero-knowledge Proof in Heterogeneous MEC

Abstract

The next generation wireless network will be a heterogeneous network with multiple access networks, and Mobile Edge Computation (MEC) is oriented to heterogeneous users with various security authentication mechanisms. However, compared to the central servers, the lightweight and the limited computing power make MEC servers hard to support multiple security authentication mechanisms at the same time. To resolve this issue, this paper introduces a blockchain based unified authentication with Zero-knowledge Proof (ZPB authentication) system. Blockchain is adopted to recorder the authentication results, so there is no need to perform secondary authentication in HetNet handoff. A non-interactive Schnorr Zero-knowledge Proof scheme is used to avoid privacy issues caused by blockchain, and it can calculate parameters in advance to reduce real-time overhead of MEC. At the same time, the mechanism of anonymous code updating periodically also makes the system more secure. Through performance analysis and simulation, it can be seen that the authentication system proposed in this paper can achieve both security and effectiveness, and is suitable for HetNet access authentication in MEC scenario.