PUF-D2PB: A Low-Latency and Low-Cost PUFs-Based Framework for Direct Mutual Authentication Between IIoT Devices and Peer Nodes in Consortium Blockchains

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices often rely on public communication channels for authentication, which makes them particularly susceptible to a variety of security threats. Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) provides a lightweight cryptographic method to address authentication challenges in resource-constrained devices. However, some PUF-based authentication frameworks store challenge-response pairs (CRPs) centrally on a server, posing risks of single point failure and performance bottlenecks in the authentication process. Although blockchain (BC) can mitigate this through decentralized storage, they still suffer from high computational overhead, large CRPs storage requirements, limited authentication efficiency, and ledger synchronization latency challenges. Therefore, we propose a novel direct mutual authentication framework for IIoT devices and peer nodes in consortium BCs, called PUF-D2PB. It enables peer nodes and IIoT devices to authenticate each other without involving BC-clients, and simultaneously supports CRP updates without requiring extra operations. In addition, we introduce a competition-based mechanism and a distributed encryption method to enhance CRP synchronization and prevent CRP leakage. Security analysis and a prototype implementation using a real PUF circuit demonstrate that our framework provides strong security guarantees and efficient authentication. Compared with existing BC-assisted PUF schemes, PUF-D2PB effectively reduces authentication latency and resource overhead while preventing CRP leakage.