The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has developed into a promising technology that raises the level of productivity and automation for smart manufacturing. Due to the growing importance of cross-domain (e.g., factory) collaboration in manufacturing, it is now commonplace for IIoT devices from different domains to communicate with one another, raising significant privacy and security risks. Recent studies have utilized blockchain in their authentication scheme to build trust across multiple domains. This integration, however, resulted in substantial communication, computation, and storage overheads, as well as vulnerability against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. To overcome these issues, in this article, we propose an efficient and highly secure blockchain-assisted authentication scheme using a combined off-chain and on-chain approach. The suggested protocol just employs one domain server for authentication of both local and foreign domain devices. The distinctive security features and applicability of the proposed protocol are demonstrated by formal security proof and performance analysis as well as comparisons with leading research works.
