A Hybrid Blockchain-Based Authentication Scheme for Smart Home

Abstract

With the development of the Internet of Things technology, the use of smart devices is ubiquitous, thereby making the smart home become an innovative IoT application to change our lives. However, the application of smart home should serve thousands of families and the number of edge servers and terminal devices s huge. Thus, it is difficult for a single central server or cluster to manage such large-scale devices with high efficiency. In addition, the structure of IoT is flexible and the edge or terminal devices can join a certain IoT system without strict restriction. The system may suffer from unauthorized access from malicious devices. In this paper, a physically secure authentication scheme for smart home based on a hybrid blockchain is proposed. A novel structure of the blockchain is leveraged to relieve the stress of the central server and storage device’s information permanently. Physical unclonable functions are used to provide identities for authorized devices. The security and evaluation analysis shows that our scheme has reliable security features and is the potential to improve the efficiency of the smart home system.