ESAChain: A Blockchain-Based Efficient Service Authentication Framework for Secure Metaverse Service Interactions

Secure and efficient service authentication is vital for trustable interactions between users and service nodes in decentralized metaverse environments. However, conventional PKI-based authentication methods face limitations such as high query latency, privacy leakage risks, and centralized trust dependencies, making them unsuitable for large-scale, real-time metaverse services. To address these challenges, we propose ESAChain, a novel blockchain-based authentication framework that e nsures lightweight, decentralized, and privacy-preserving identity verification. Specifically, we propose a Mutually Exclusive Cuckoo Filter (MECF) integrated with a Filter Hash Chain (FHC), which provides lightweight data structures and efficient querying capabilities for certificate status. Furthermore, we design a trust-decay-based Delegated Proof-of-Stake (TD-DPoS) consensus mechanism to maintain the integrity and reliability of certificate status data by dynamically adjusting node trust values and decaying votes to prevent single-node dominance. We also incorporate a blind-signature-based authentication mechanism to enhance privacy-preserving identity authentication by preventing tracking of certificate verification requests. Extensive simulation experiments and security analyses demonstrate that ESAChain significantly reduces query latency and data transmission overhead, enhances consensus robustness, and provides an efficient, trustworthy, and privacy-preserving authentication solution for secure metaverse services.