Apparatus and method for local authentication of a collection of processing devices, such as but not limited to storage devices (e.g., SSDs, etc.). In some embodiments, an edge computing device is coupled between the collection of processing devices and an external network. The edge computing device performs a network authentication over the external network with a remote server using an edge token. The edge computing device further performs a local authentication of the collection using storage tokens of the respective processing devices, with the local authentication not utilizing the external network or the remote server. Both the edge token and the storage tokens may be generated from a client token of a client device.