A multi-level trusted authentication mechanism in large-scale edge computing environments

With the development of the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet, and intelligent transportation, edge computing has attracted extensive attention for reducing latency and improving computing efficiency. However, its decentralization and dynamic changes in computing nodes make identity authentication and trustworthiness guarantee challenging. The traditional centralized authentication mechanism relies on the central server, which has the problems of single point of failure and insufficient scalability. Although the blockchain-based authentication mechanism has the advantages of decentralization, it has high computing overhead and limited throughput, which is difficult to meet the needs of large-scale edge computing. To this end, this paper proposes a multi-level trusted dynamic continuous authentication mechanism, which adopts a tree-like hierarchical authentication model to improve authentication efficiency, reduce latency and load concentration through step-by-step authentication and regional division, and combines trusted computing technology (TPM/TCM) for remote authentication and dynamic continuous measurement, periodically monitors the trusted status of devices, and detects tampering and attacks in time. The experiment simulates the authentication environment of 100 to 10,000 edge computing nodes, and compares the performance of this mechanism with centralized and blockchain authentication mechanisms in terms of authentication delay, throughput, resource consumption, scalability, and security. The results show that this mechanism has more advantages in reducing authentication latency, improving throughput and optimizing resource utilization, and can effectively prevent identity forgery, replay and device tampering attacks. Although it is still affected by factors such as computing overhead and hardware dependency, it has a wide range of application prospects in the fields of edge computing, industrial control, and smart cities.