SECURING AVIATION NETWORKS THROUGH BLOCKCHAIN: ARCHITECTURE, CHALLENGES, AND SOLUTIONS

Abstract

The aviation industry depends on data integrity across supply chains spanning OEMs, MRO organizations, airlines, lessors, and national regulators. Centralized data management systems — still dominant in the sector — expose the ecosystem to single points of failure and provide limited traceability of millions of aircraft parts circulating annually. This paper presents a structured review of blockchain-based security architectures for aviation networks, synthesized from 14 peer-reviewed sources published between 2018 and 2025, retrieved from IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, ACM Digital Library, and Wiley/Hindawi. On this basis, a thirteen-step design method is proposed for integrating permissioned blockchain with distributed cloud infrastructure in aviation environments. The method is grounded in quantitative acceptance criteria — throughput ≥ 500 TPS, smart contract execution latency < 200 ms (p95), system availability 99.9% — and maps each design phase to specific security controls (integrity, access control, auditability, privacy, resilience, governance). Core mechanisms are formalized via hash-chain integrity verification, attribute-based access control functions, zero-knowledge proof verification, and a composite pre-ledger trust-scoring model. The principal finding: permissioned blockchain architectures — Hyperledger Fabric in particular — can support aviation requirements for immutable audit trails, decentralized identity management, and regulatory compliance with EASA and FAA; adoption remains constrained by organizational readiness and the unresolved GIGO problem at the ledger boundary.