Stateless Blockchain-Based Lightweight Identity Management Architecture for Industrial IoT Applications

The rapid development of the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) has led to an exponential growth in the deployment of industrial applications on user-owned smart devices, which poses significant challenges in identity management (IDM) concerning both privacy and quantity. The advent of blockchain technology can fulfill some of these requirements. However, as the number of identities in the IIoT environment grows exponentially, the storage occupied by nodes in the blockchain system gets larger gradually and can never be curtailed. In addition, to maintain the security of identity information, the characteristics of blockchain on openness and transparency are not appropriate for IDM. To this end, we propose a lightweight, secure, and trustworthy stateless blockchain-enabled IDM architecture for IIoT. Specifically, by incorporating the cryptographic accumulator with blockchain, the set of transactions can be turned into a length-constant proof that does not change when identities are modified, in which the identity information is concealed completely. Furthermore, the stateless blockchain structure is formulated and new consensus, identity modification and verification algorithms are presented. Then, we give a comprehensive threat model and security analysis of the proposed system. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that total time cost and blockchain size are 130.25 ms and 100.13 MB, which significantly improves portability and efficiency in IIoT scenarios.