EPASC-SH: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Authentication and Secure Communication Protocol for Smart Homes

Existing authentication schemes in smart home environments often suffer from centralized reliance, high computational overhead, and vulnerability to single-point failures. Therefore, this paper proposes a distributed aggregated signature-based authentication scheme. The scheme employs an anonymous mechanism to collaboratively generate anonymous identity signatures, through multiple authorization centers to reduce the risk of single-point failure and enhance privacy protection. The signature accumulator aggregates and uniformly verifies the signatures of multiple smart devices to reduce the computational overhead and improve the authentication efficiency. Experimental results show that the scheme can effectively improve the efficiency of signature generation in smart home environments and outperforms existing authentication schemes in terms of computation, communication, and energy overhead, thus providing an identity authentication method with strong security, high authentication efficiency, and privacy protection for smart home systems.