Lightweight Attribute-Based Cross-Domain Authentication for Power IoT with Edge Computing Integration

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Power Internet of Things (PIoT), the number of grid terminals has grown exponentially, and the types of equipment have become increasingly heterogeneous, covering different management domains such as power generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption. This has resulted in complex multi-domain collaborative business scenarios. In this context, when a large number of heterogeneous terminal devices access across domains, they face severe challenges such as low authentication efficiency, high computational overhead, and complex policy management due to frequent cross-domain identity verification, dynamic changing access permissions, and limited terminal resources. Traditional centralized authentication schemes based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) rely on a unified certificate authority (CA) and frequent certificate verification interactions, which have single-point performance bottlenecks, high communication latency, and difficulty in supporting fine-grained dynamic authorization. These schemes cannot meet the dual requirements of the Power Internet of Things for real-time performance, lightweight design, and flexible access control. Although existing attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes support attribute-based access control, they generally face limitations such as complex policy parsing, high bilinear pairing computation overhead, and the absence of cross-domain mutual recognition mechanisms. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight, attribute-based, cross-domain authentication method that is integrated with edge computing. By constructing a three-tiered ‘cloud-edge-end’ collaborative hierarchical authentication architecture, authentication computation tasks are offloaded to edge nodes, enabling localized authentication services. Our design incorporates a lightweight, elliptic curve cryptography-based, attribute-based encryption mechanism that replaces bi-linear pairing with scalar multiplication, as well as a cross-domain attribute mapping method based on consortium blockchain smart contracts to support the automatic conversion and mutual recognition of multi-domain attributes. Additionally, a distributed credential management subsystem that integrates blockchain and secret sharing is employed to facilitate the efficient issuance and dynamic revocation of edge-side certificates. Together, these form a complete cross-domain authentication mechanism that covers the entire ‘registration-authentication-key update’ process. Experimental results demonstrate that this method consistently maintains low total authentication overhead under varying concurrency pressures, delivering high semantic security and precise, fine-grained access control. It outperforms existing mainstream approaches in terms of authentication efficiency, computational overhead and system scalability, all without compromising security. This makes it suitable for collaborative scenarios involving multiple domains and the Internet of Things where resources are limited.