IoT-SBIdM: A Privacy-Preserving Stateless Blockchain-Based Identity Management for Trustworthy Internet of Things IoT Ecosystems

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to billions of interconnected devices generating and exchanging sensitive data across diverse domains, which introduces challenges in identity management (IdM) regarding privacy, scalability, and verifiability. While blockchain technology provides decentralization and tamper resistance, its transparency and increasing on-chain storage demands make it unsuitable for large-scale IoT identity ecosystems. To overcome these challenges, IoT-SBIdM is proposed as a lightweight, privacy-preserving, and stateless blockchain-based identity management framework designed for IoT environments. This framework incorporates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based accumulators and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to facilitate selective disclosure, enabling entities to prove credential authenticity without exposing sensitive identity information. Furthermore, the framework adopts W3C-compliant Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to promote interoperability and user-controlled identity ownership. The experimental results indicate that IoT-SBIdM achieves efficient smart contract execution by reducing gas costs through optimized registry logic. Moreover, the system maintains a compact block size of only 45 MB at higher block heights, outperforming comparable schemes in storage efficiency by achieving a 55% reduction relative to recent models and an approximate 94% reduction relative to older systems, thereby demonstrating superior scalability and storage efficiency, making it suitable for identity management solutions for IoT environments.