An Efficient Decentralized Mutual Authentication Scheme Between Avatars for Metaverse.

With the development of network technology and the blockchain, the metaverse as an emerging network paradigm has received extensive attention. In metaverse, users can create multiple virtual avatars to obtain different experiences such as extreme sports, interstellar travel, etc. Different from the traditional network model, there are frequent interactions between avatars in metaverse, leading to heavy authentication requirements. However, existing authentication schemes between different avatars mostly require real-time participation of third-party entity (TPE) such as trusted authority (TA) and server. Therefore, when facing high-concurrency authentication requirements between avatars in metaverse, existing schemes are prone to forming computational or communication bottlenecks at TPE, resulting in low authentication efficiency. To address this issue, the paper proposed an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based mutual authentication scheme for avatars in metaverse without real-time participation of TPE, which can effectively avoid computational and communication bottlenecks formed at TPE and improve authentication efficiency. The security of our proposed scheme is proved under the real-or-random (ROR) model and informal security analysis. Performance analysis and evaluation show that compared with current existing schemes, the proposed scheme has higher authentication efficiency.