A blockchain-based authentication protocol for metaverse environments using a zero knowledge proof

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>The metaverse, which consists of several universes called verses, is predicted to be the Internet of the future. Recently, this idea has received a lot of discussions, but not enough attention has been paid to the security concerns of these virtual worlds. Primarily when the user and platform server communicate with each other and share sensitive information using the public channel, any attacker can capture the message and can perform various types of attacks such as privacy attack, violation of perfect forward secrecy, impersonation attack, ephemeral secret leakage attack and traceability attack. Therefore, there is impelling need to design an authentication protocol for the metaverse environment that can secure the communication between the user and the platform server. Taking this into account, we designed a zero-knowledge proof authentication protocol based on blockchain for the metaverse environment. The security of the designed protocol is verified through the Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, Scyther tool, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The outcome of the security verification demonstrates that the designed metaverse authentication protocol mitigates all the attacks mentioned above. Moreover, we evaluated the performance of the designed metaverse authentication protocol in terms of computational, communication, storage costs, and energy consumption and compared it with existing metaverse authentication protocols, showing good results taking into account the additional security strength.</p></div>