Blockchain technology uses a consensus mechanism to create and finalize blocks. The consensus mechanism affects the total performance parameters of the blockchain network, such as throughput. In this paper, we present “Nazfast”, a simplified proof of stake—Byzantine fault tolerance based consensus mechanism to create and finalize blocks. The presented consensus is completed in multiple folds. For block producer and validation committee selection, we used a secure and speeded-up election mechanism, S&Sem, in Nazfast. The consensus is designed for fast block finalization in a malicious environment. The simulation result shows that we approximately achieved three block finalizations in 1 s with almost similar latency. We reduced and fixed the number of validators in the consensus to improve the throughput. We achieved a higher throughput among other consensus of the same family. Because we reduced the number of validators, the safety parameters of the consensus are at risk, so we used Sea Shield to improve the overall consensus safety. This is another blockchain to save nodes’ details when they join/unjoin the network as validators. By using all three parts together, our system is protected from 28-plus different attacks, and we maintain a high decentralization by using S&Sem. Finally, we also enhance the incentive mechanism of consensus to improve the liveness of the network.
Objective: The combination of 5G connectivity and edge computing known as 5G Edge, lifts the limitations of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and enables a plethora of authentic healthcare services, including access to medical information and diagnosis. Additionally, there is a chance that malicious insiders using the 5G Edge platform could compromise the security and confidentiality of IoMT data. As a result, end users cannot trust 5G Edge data. Materials and methods: This paper imagines a new hierarchical blockchain edge of things (HBEoT) architecture that would facilitate healthcare applications managed by blockchain at the network edge. Additionally, the article delves into how HBEoT can offer security services such as authenticating users, protecting data, detecting attacks, and managing trust. First, the consensus method PoS generates a block for healthcare data, and its hash values are kept in the blockchain. The Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocol stores secret information in the blockchain, authenticating healthcare systems for enhanced privacy and security. Results: To ensure immutable data storage, the suggested architecture incorporates 5G Edge servers into a blockchain platform. It prevents unauthorised users from accessing healthcare services by acting as an anonymous authenticator. We assessing the proposed methods efficiency in terms of latency, throughput, communication cost, energy consumption cost and the validation between ZKP prover and verifier. Conclusion: We conduct multiple experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the suggested framework. To further investigate the quality measures, such as authenticate latency, throughput rate was examined. To fulfil the requirements for a 5G-enabled healthcare system, the research shows that the suggested HBEoT-ZKP performs a decrease in latency of around 1.16 s and an improvement in throughput of approximately 339 tps. Communication and energy cost is evaluated and compared with other conventional methods.
Faced with multiple societal challenges, the healthcare sector has been compelled to leverage recent and emerging technologies to adapt. Blockchain is one of the leading technologies, offering transparency, process automation, immutability of traces and the ability to scale up in terms of both the volume of processes and the number of players interacting. The goal of the paper is to show the potential of blockchain technology - alone or merged with other technologies - to help the healthcare system evolve and provide scalable, efficient and secure solutions to four healthcare applications: electronic health record (EHR) storage, health data sharing, remote patient monitoring, and pharmaceutical supply chains. After identifying the functional and security requirements of healthcare systems, the paper conducts an in-depth review of the literature. The survey assesses the effectiveness of blockchain-based solutions in meeting functional, privacy and security needs. It is completed by an analysis of the synergies that can be expected between blockchain and emerging technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence, federated learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Large Language Models (LLM), to the benefit of security or privacy in healthcare.
Aryan A Ayare, Vaishnavi A Jadhav, Mustafa K Banatwala, Shashank V Changlere · 6 authors
Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger technology that ensures data security, transparency, and immutability, making it a promising solution for academic record management. Currently, academic records are managed through centralized databases controlled by educational institutions, relying on manual processes, institutional servers, and third-party services. These systems are prone to inefficiencies, data breaches, and authentication challenges, often requiring time-consuming verification processes vulnerable to fraud. Blockchain technology addresses these limitations by offering a decentralized, tamper-proof framework that enhances security, accessibility, and trust in academic credential verification. This study reviews various blockchain platforms, consensus mechanisms, and scalability solutions, with a focus on Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, assessing their applicability in educational contexts. Furthermore, off-chain storage techniques like InterPlanetary File System, consensus algorithms, and access control mechanisms are analyzed to optimize the efficient and secure management of sensitive academic data. By integrating blockchain technology, educational institutions can modernize record-keeping, streamline verification processes, and enhance trust in academic credentials, ultimately creating a more secure and transparent academic record management system. Statistical analysis further highlights blockchain's growing adoption in education, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing fraud, improving accessibility, and ensuring data integrity.
This research examines the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in blockchain consensus algorithms, presenting an extensive overview of current improvements and anticipated effects. We conducted a thorough examination of a diverse array of academic sources, encompassing a broad spectrum of AI methodologies, such as machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, that have been applied to blockchain consensus mechanisms. The study highlights critical areas where AI can bolster blockchain performance, including enhancing effectiveness, dependability, and flexibility. Despite the promising benefits that AI integration offers, it also presents complexities and potential security risks, including data centralization and increased computational power requirements. In this analysis, we review the risks and examine the proposed mitigation strategies from existing studies, such as federated learning to preserve data privacy, secure multi-party computation to protect sensitive data, and decentralized AI marketplaces to distribute AI resources fairly. This study makes a significant contribution to the field by emphasizing the dual potential of AI to both improve and challenge blockchain systems. By advocating for balanced approaches that prioritize decentralization and security, our findings aim to provide direction for future research and practical applications in this multidisciplinary field.
Jesus Gama-Rodnguez, Ekam Puri Nieto, Juan Francisco Martínez Gil, Agustín Marín Frutos
Exploration in the crucial role of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) sharing and lifecycle security in IoT ecosystems. It examines how the ERATOSTHENES project leverages distributed ledger technology (DLT) and an inter-ledger approach to facilitate secure and privacy-preserving CTI exchange across different domains. The chapter also discusses the use of Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) files, including the proposed Threat MUD extension, to manage security configurations and mitigation actions throughout the device lifecycle. Additionally, it highlights the integration of these components to achieve a system that dynamically responds to cybersecurity incidents, ensuring the ongoing protection of devices and domains.
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are essential to intelligent transportation systems (ITS), enabling secure, real-time communication among vehicles and infrastructure. However, their decentralized and dynamic nature makes them vulnerable to threats such as Sybil attacks, message forgery, replay attacks, and Denial-of-Service (DoS). This paper presents VANETGuard, a lightweight scalable trust management system that enhances security and scalability in 5G-enabled smart vehicular networks. The proposed system integrates entropy-based anomaly detection, Bayesian inference for adaptive trust scoring, and a lightweight distributed ledger for decentralized, tamper-resistant trust storage. Large-scale simulations under realistic traffic and attack conditions demonstrate that VANETGuard achieves 99.97% detection accuracy, significantly reduces false positives, and maintains low latency and computational overhead while supporting over 300 vehicles. These results highlight VANETGuard’s potential to enable secure, efficient, and scalable trust mechanisms in next-generation ITS and urban mobility systems.
Antonio Villafranca, Igor Tasic, Victor Gallegos, Almudena Giménez · 7 authors
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG), are being positioned as a promising solution for smart agriculture by enabling secure, decentralized, and transparent traceability systems. However, these technologies face challenges related to scalability, latency, and efficiency in IoT environments. In this study, we conduct a comparative analysis of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DAG technologies through extensive simulations, varying transaction generation rates and network latencies. A key methodological innovation of this research is the detailed codification of agricultural data transactions, encompassing parameters such as crop type, fertilization, harvesting, and transportation, enabling a structured and scalable approach to data representation. Our results reveal that Bitcoin's robustness is hindered by its high sensitivity to latency and network load, with inclusion times exceeding 700 s. Ethereum demonstrates better adaptability, with controlled inclusion times ranging from 12.91 to 35.76 s under varying conditions. DAG outperforms both, achieving significantly lower inclusion times between 4.27 and 22.25 s, highlighting its suitability for real-time applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a direct comparison of these technologies in the context of agricultural traceability, showcasing the advantages and limitations of DAG-based systems for managing and scaling agricultural IoT networks.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) seeks to improve smart factory productivity by leveraging automation and scalability. For automation in industry, optimization, collaboration and protection, and scalability, the IoTs paradigm, technology for communication and information, and intelligent systems are integrated as a single organism. This article presents a blockchain-assisted safe data-sharing mechanism that provides security requirements in the industry using IoT. End-to-end authentication is developed based on the blockchain's reputation, and the smart contract is used to validate nodes' security measures. Through integrity verification and categorization in node terminals and industry, the blockchain paradigm manages data collection and dissemination. An efficient proof of authentication (PoAh) consensus mechanism is created using the blockchain network to build a collaborative network to preserve logs and verification data in the industrial IoT. It accomplishes trustworthy authentication and endpoint activity tracing, and edge computing is used in blockchain nodes to offer device authentication processes that utilize smart contracts and PoAh. According to an experimental study, the proposed architecture lowers the authentication time and obtains a high response rate. The proposed system's service time shows the efficiency of PoAh-based blockchain architecture for industrial IoT compared with existing works. Finally, we evaluated various block sizes to ensure an efficient transaction rate. The outcomes demonstrate the practicality of the suggested and put-into-practice architecture, distinguished by enhanced data audibility, device data ownership, security, and privacy while utilizing decentralized storage.
Although differential privacy (DP) is widely regarded as the de facto standard for data privacy, its implementation remains vulnerable to unfaithful execution by servers, particularly in distributed settings. In such cases, servers may sample noise from incorrect distributions or generate correlated noise while appearing to follow established protocols. This work addresses these malicious behaviours in a distributed client-server-verifier setup, under Verifiable Distributed Differential Privacy (VDDP), a novel framework for the verifiable execution of distributed DP mechanisms. We systematically capture end-to-end security and privacy guarantees against potentially colluding adversarial behaviours of clients, servers, and verifiers by characterizing the connections and distinctions between VDDP and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). We develop three novel and efficient instantiations of VDDP: (1) the Verifiable Distributed Discrete Laplace Mechanism (VDDLM), which achieves up to a 400,000x improvement in proof generation efficiency with only 0.1--0.2x error compared with the previous state-of-the-art verifiable differentially private mechanism and includes a tight privacy analysis that accounts for all additional privacy losses due to numerical imprecisions, applicable to other secure computation protocols for DP mechanisms based on cryptography; (2) the Verifiable Distributed Discrete Gaussian Mechanism (VDDGM), an extension of VDDLM that incurs limited overhead in real-world applications; and (3) an improved solution to Verifiable Randomized Response (VRR) under local DP, as a special case of VDDP, achieving up to a 5,000x reduction in communication costs and verifier overhead.
Saad Alahmari, Amal Alshardan, Fahd N. Al‐Wesabi, Shaymaa E. Sorour · 8 authors
As healthcare services have become increasingly digitized, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have become widely adopted, providing seamless data exchange among providers. Conventional EHRs, however, are extremely vulnerable to cyber threats because patients' sensitive data is centralized and transmitted electronically. The paper proposes a decentralized, privacy-preserving framework for managing EHRs on blockchains in order to address these security and privacy concerns. Using cryptographic techniques, such as homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, the proposed system enhances security and ensures data integrity. Additionally, the model facilitates scalable, efficient, and secure access to patient records through the integration of cloud-based storage and blockchain. Using smart contracts, we also ensure compliance with healthcare regulations by regulating access control and authentication. As a result of performance evaluations, the proposed approach is demonstrated to be feasible, and the advantages it offers in terms of security, privacy, and efficiency are highlighted.
Mrs. S. Sri Sayelakshmi, Randhir Kumar, M Harini, B Oviya
In modern cloud computing environments, data is often stored on cloud servers in the form of ciphertext to ensure security and confidentiality. Access to this encrypted data typically requires a third party to provide an access key to the consumer. However, the existing use of the SHA-256 encryption method has limitations, as it leaves the data vulnerable to tampering. To address this issue, a Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm is proposed as a more secure alternative. In this approach, data is encrypted using a robust encryption algorithm, and all transactions are recorded on a blockchain using the PoS algorithm. This method not only enhances data security by making tampering more difficult but also ensures the integrity of transactions by securely storing them in blocks. The proposed system offers a more resilient and tamper-resistant solution for cloud data storage and access, managing sensitive information in the cloud. Additionally, it reduces dependency on third-party key providers, further minimizing security risks.
This study integrates blockchain technology into smart agriculture to enhance its productivity and sustainability. By combining blockchain with remote sensing, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT), a Human-Cyber-Physical System (H-CPS) architecture tailored for agricultural applications is proposed. It supports real-time crop management, data-driven decision-making, and transparent trading of agricultural products. A semantic-based blockchain framework is introduced to address challenges in data management and AI model integration, optimizing production, improving traceability, reducing costs, and enhancing financial security. This framework directly addresses real-world agricultural challenges, such as optimized irrigation, improved crop breeding efficiency, and enhanced supply chain transparency. These innovations provide practical solutions for modern agriculture, contributing to sustainable development and global food security. Further research and collaboration are encouraged to unlock its full potential in transforming agricultural practices.
Blockchain has been broadly practiced in different markets. It is decentralized, unchangeable, and transparent. Our essay summarizes its practices in three key industries including finance, healthcare, as well as supply chain management. In the former, it benefits efficiency in payment and settlement, preventing greenwashing and optimizing carbon trading. In the middle, it helps in digital health check management, clinical trial transparency, and insurance claim simplification. Blockchain also brings product traceability and multi-party collaboration, while facilitating managing flow. Our work uncovered the common obstacles blockchain practices confronted. Future direction standing on newest research heats and multi-subjects are identified. Hopefully, we can plant theoretical bases and practical guidance in blockchain's coming development and general practices.
As a result of IoT-based Wireless Sensor Networks (IoT-WSNs), resource-constrained environments are becoming more efficient and dynamic. Even though IoT-WSNs have many advantages, they also face significant challenges, including their high energy consumption, limited lifespan, and security vulnerabilities. IoT-WSNs for smart cities could be made more energy-efficient and secure by using a blockchain-based approach. Blockchain technology improves energy efficiency and reduces communication costs while ensuring decentralized, secure spectrum management. A smart contract and distributed ledger mechanism reduce redundant data transmissions and facilitate network trust. A blockchain-enabled clustering mechanism allows energy-aware sensing and resource allocation, as well as cognitive radio technology used for efficient spectrum utilization. Compared to existing techniques, the proposed method is more energy efficient, more accurate in sensing spectrums, and more secure. IoT-WSNs provide a solution to energy and security challenges in smart city infrastructure, contributing to sustainable development.
This article examines how blockchain technology can revolutionize healthcare data management through enhanced interoperability and automated compliance mechanisms. Healthcare organizations currently face critical challenges with data fragmentation, regulatory adherence, and security vulnerabilities that blockchain architecture addresses through its fundamental characteristics. The decentralized framework creates a secure environment where healthcare stakeholders can exchange information with confidence while maintaining strict privacy controls. Key blockchain components—distributed ledgers, consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, and cryptographic validation—work in concert to enable real-time compliance monitoring, automated audit documentation, and tamper-proof record-keeping. Permissioned blockchain networks prove particularly valuable in healthcare contexts, providing the governance structures necessary for sensitive health information while delivering performance suitable for clinical environments. Implementation case studies reveal tangible benefits including reduced administrative burden, fewer compliance violations, improved data integrity, and faster information exchange between institutions. While healthcare organizations must navigate implementation hurdles such as technical complexity and regulatory uncertainty, the technology demonstrates promising return on investment and positions healthcare providers to meet evolving interoperability standards while strengthening their security posture and compliance capabilities.
The increasing interconnectivity of devices on the Internet of Things (IoT) introduces significant security challenges, particularly around authentication and data management. Traditional centralized approaches are not sufficient to address these risks, requiring more robust and decentralized solutions. This paper presents a decentralized authentication protocol leveraging blockchain technology and the IPFS data management framework to provide secure and real-time communication between IoT devices. Using the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts, elliptic curve cryptography, and ASCON encryption, the proposed protocol ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive IoT data. The mutual authentication process involves the use of asymmetric key pairs, public key registration on the blockchain, and the Diffie–Hellman key exchange algorithm to establish a shared secret that, combined with a unique identifier, enables secure device verification. Additionally, IPFS is used for secure data storage, with the content identifier (CID) encrypted using ASCON and integrated into the blockchain for traceability and authentication. This integrated approach addresses current IoT security challenges and provides a solid foundation for future applications in decentralized IoT environments.
ABSTRACT Blockchain technology is gaining importance in different sectors like healthcare, finance, agriculture, and many more. The important capabilities of blockchain like decentralization, immutability, consensus mechanism, etc. provide security, privacy, transparency, accountability, and many other benefits. On the other hand, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a distributed framework that provides cloud computing capabilities to mobile devices. The existing studies combining blockchain technology and MEC often do not consider the delay and energy consumption for data offloading. In this paper, a blockchain‐based scheme has been proposed for sharing Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) data between a patient and a doctor, which offloads tasks to the MEC server to achieve energy efficiency. In the proposed scheme, the Non‐Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) protocol is used to share a channel among several users. Here, NOMA offers some advantages in the system like low cost, latency, and power consumption. In the proposed scheme, the energy consumption is optimized based on the task delegation decision and resource distribution in the MEC server. Additionally, operations of the blockchain network are automated using various smart contracts. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is analyzed in terms of energy consumption, average transmission rate, and offloading delay in processing healthcare data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model enhances energy efficiency and optimizes performance compared to the state‐of‐the‐art offloading schemes.
Seung Eel Oh, Jong‐Hoon Kim, Ji-Young Kim, Jae Hwan Ahn
The complexity of contemporary supply chains and the rise in foodborne illness cases have made ensuring food safety and traceability a top responsibility on a worldwide scale. Traditional traceability systems are prone to data tampering, fragmentation, and limited compatibility. Public blockchains have scalability, latency, and privacy problems that limit their use in real-time food safety systems, despite the fact that blockchain provides a secure data structure. Using Hyperledger Fabric, GS1 EPCIS standards, and Internet of Things-enabled environmental sensors, this paper suggests a private blockchain-based food safety monitoring system. To guarantee fault-tolerant, high-throughput processing in a permissioned blockchain setting, a Raft consensus mechanism was used. Hyperledger Caliper was used to benchmark the system once it was deployed with four nodes. According to experimental data, transaction throughput peaked at 230.2 TPS and averaged 207.4 ± 10.2 TPS. As the network grew from two to four nodes, latency increased somewhat from 259.3 ± 9.5 ms to 278.7 ± 9.1 ms, while block finalization time stayed below 3.184 ± 0.113 s. Over 114,925 documented transactions, data integrity was confirmed to be flawless. These results demonstrate that private blockchain technology can provide effective, scalable, and impenetrable food traceability, boosting openness and confidence throughout food networks.
The rapid expansion of 5G networks and edge computing has amplified security challenges in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, including unauthorized access, data tampering, and DDoS attacks. This paper introduces EdgeChainGuard, a hybrid blockchain-based authentication framework designed to secure 5G-enabled IoT systems through decentralized identity management, smart contract-based access control, and AI-driven anomaly detection. By combining permissioned and permissionless blockchain layers with Layer-2 scaling solutions and adaptive consensus mechanisms, the framework enhances both security and scalability while maintaining computational efficiency. Using synthetic datasets that simulate real-world adversarial behaviour, our evaluation shows an average authentication latency of 172.50 s and a 50% reduction in gas fees compared to traditional Ethereum-based implementations. The results demonstrate that EdgeChainGuard effectively enforces tamper-resistant authentication, reduces unauthorized access, and adapts to dynamic network conditions. Future research will focus on integrating zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy preservation, federated learning for decentralized AI retraining, and lightweight anomaly detection models to enable secure, low-latency authentication in resource-constrained IoT deployments.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A. Althaf Ali, M. A. Gunavathie, V. Srinivasan, M. Aruna · 6 authors
The integration of smart city applications with healthcare has revolutionized patient monitoring and medical data management. However, ensuring the privacy and security of Electronic Health Records (EHR) remains a critical challenge, especially in IoT-based environments with resource-constrained devices. This paper proposes a novel Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning (BFL) framework to enhance privacy preservation in EHR processing. The proposed framework leverages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) for authentication and homomorphic encryption for secure computation, ensuring robust data security without exposing raw patient data. Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized model training across IoT devices, reducing privacy risks while maintaining data utility. Additionally, blockchain technology enhances the integrity and transparency of EHR transactions by creating a tamper-proof ledger. The performance of the proposed BFL framework is evaluated based on data utility, model accuracy, execution time, and scalability across varying sizes of EHR datasets. Results demonstrate improved privacy preservation, reduced computational overhead, and enhanced model efficiency, making it a promising approach for secure and privacy-aware IoT-based smart healthcare systems.
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) offers a critical security framework for AI-powered cloud systems, replacing traditional perimeter-based defenses with the principle of "never trust, always verify." As organizations deploy increasingly sophisticated AI workloads in distributed cloud environments, they face unique and acute security challenges including model poisoning, adversarial attacks, and extraction attempts targeting valuable intellectual property. ZTA addresses these challenges through continuous authentication, least privilege access, micro-segmentation, and ongoing monitoring specifically calibrated for AI systems. Implementation requires balancing security with performance considerations, managing complexity, addressing skill gaps, and overcoming technical debt in legacy systems. Emerging approaches including AI-powered security tools, zero-knowledge proofs, hardware-based security measures, and standardized frameworks for autonomous systems are shaping the future of AI security in cloud environments, enabling organizations to realize the benefits of AI innovation while maintaining robust protection.