Abstract:

As a surreal ternary world, the metaverse provides people with massive and diverse network services.However, due to the lack of face-to-face communication in reality and the broken geographical and time constraints, the existing schemes cannot effectively authenticate digital citizens while realizing privacy protection and accountability.Therefore, a metaverse-oriented digital citizen authentication scheme was proposed.Firstly, a layered authentication scheme based on the time-sensitive identity was constructed.Secondly, for protecting citizens’ privacy, the Paillier homomorphic encryption algorithm and structure-preserving signature scheme were introduced to realize the double unlink ability of decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, in addition, the citizens’ right to be forgotten was guaranteed by the code embedding technology.Thirdly, the regulatory factor during the authentication phase for accountability was designed.Finally, the security analysis proves that the proposed scheme satisfies the unlinkability and traceability.And, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme has lower computational cost and gas overhead, which can meet the needs of practical use.

Key words: metaverse, digital citizen, authentication, unlinkability, accountability, right to be forgotten, blockchain