A Review of Blockchain-Based Authentication Research

Abstract

Blockchain, as a decentralized and tamperproof distributed ledger technology, has gained wide attention in finance, Internet of Things and other fields since it was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Identity authentication is the basic guarantee for cyberspace security, but traditional centralized identity management suffers from single point of failure, privacy leakage and poor interoperability. Blockchain-based identity authentication utilizes distributed trust mechanism and cryptography technology, which is expected to realize secure sharing and autonomous control of identity data. In this paper, we systematically sort out the infrastructure (network layer, consensus mechanism, etc.) and types of blockchain technology, and elaborate the supportive role of the combination of blockchain and cryptography (hashing, digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) for identity authentication. It focuses on an overview of the research progress on the improvement of public key infrastructure (PKI), biometric combination scheme, and the integration of decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VC) in the blockchain environment, and analyzes its application examples in the scenarios of Internet of Things (IoT), smart grids, finance, healthcare, and education. This paper summarizes the current challenges and limitations of blockchain identity authentication, such as performance scaling, privacy protection, standards interoperability, key management, etc., and the possible future research directions, including more efficient consensus algorithms, zeroknowledge proof applications, cross-chain identity mutual recognition mechanisms, and improvement of policies and regulations.