A Smart Contract-Based Authentication Scheme for Securing Metaverse Environment in Web 3.0

Abstract

The Metaverse has evolved into a transformative ecosystem, merging virtual and physical realities with consumer electronics and IoT to enable immersive experiences. However, vulnerabilities like avatar impersonation, identity theft, and Sybil attacks, compounded by centralized intermediaries, underscore the urgent need for decentralized solutions to enhance interoperability, security, and user-centricity. This paper proposes a smart contract-based authentication scheme for the Metaverse, leveraging Web 3.0 technologies to achieve decentralization and address existing limitations. The scheme ensures user-server and avatar-avatar authentication while maintaining anonymity, unlinkability, and incorporating an avatar revocation mechanism. Security validation is conducted using the informal analysis, and smart contract implementation. The system’s operational efficiency is benchmarked against existing solutions using metrics such as computational, bandwidth, and communication costs. Results demonstrate the proposed scheme’s superior performance in reducing computational and communication overhead, making it highly suitable for Metaverse applications. Additionally, the smart contract is implemented on the Ethereum test network, confirming its feasibility and showcasing an acceptable cost for blockchain consumption.