Blockchain-Assisted Authentication and Energy-Efficient Clustering Framework for Secure IoT Communication

Securing sensitive information is a challenging task in an IoT environment due to the resource constraints of edge devices. Simultaneously, ensuring energy-efficient communication is equally important in clustered IoT networks. Resource depletion impacts the overall network lifetime. Existing methodologies treat authentication and routing as separate tasks, which leads to security vulnerabilities. Many existing authentication techniques use centralized control and static key management and are therefore vulnerable to various kinds of attacks including impersonation and brute force attacks. To address these issues, a blockchain based decentralized authentication and privacy-preserving framework for clustered IoT networks is proposed in this paper. A Trusted Domain Authority (TDA) enforces authentication among IoT devices, users, and gateways. It securely stores the authentication credentials of these entities in the blockchain and creates dynamic session keys for the Cluster Heads(CHs). The clusters are formed using a ranking-based K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) algorithm. Reward-based Deep Q-Learning (OR-DQL) selects optimal CHs by using energy, vicinity, and trust as parameters. Additionally, the proposed framework safeguards packet headers from traffic analysis using a bounded Laplace differential privacy mechanism. The TDA generates dynamic session keys using Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and securely distributes them to the CHs using the lightweight PRESENT cipher. The proposed system is implemented on the NS-3 network simulator. The simulation results demonstrate an improvement in throughput by 30.7%, a reduction in energy consumption by 24%, and a reduction in end-to-end delay by 27.7% compared to protocols such as ESMR and PBA. These results confirm that the suggested system can provide energy efficient secure communication in IoT networks.