Zone of trust: blockchain assisted IoT authentication to support cross-communication between bubbles of trusted IoTs

The Internet of Things ecosystem includes entities that perform different activities, such as data collection, communication, and processing. Collaborative IoT ecosystems require techniques for message source authentication to ensure that data is obtained from authentic sources. Current centralized authentication schemes are not suitable because they are prone to security threats, privacy issues, single point of failure, and have scalability concerns. There are multiple blockchain-based decentralized authentication techniques, but they have limitations in terms of cross-communication. This research presents a blockchain-based authentication and message integrity scheme to support cross-communication. The proposed technique supports authentication, data integrity, and non-repudiation. The experimental results show that it is cost-effective, efficient, and satisfies the requirements of cross-communication in distributed environment. Moreover, it exhibits superior performance when compared with the state-of-the-art techniques.