G. Sharmila, K. Neha, M. Kaviya, M. Juhe Sherin · 5 authors
Blockchain technology is a cutting-edge advancement in information technology. Bitcoin, as one of its initial uses, has attracted considerable attention as a cryptocurrency. Alongside Ethereum, which emphasizes blockchain-driven smart contracts, these technologies lie at the heart of modern cryptocurrency innovation. Off-chain transactions offer a scalable solution for blockchain networks, reducing congestion, lowering transaction fees, and improving processing efficiency without compromising decentralization. However, existing off-chain solutions often face security and flexibility challenges, particularly in environments with high latency and unstable connectivity. The proposed system leverages the Hardhat blockchain framework with Ethereum to enable secure peer-to-peer transactions from user wallets, ensuring seamless fund transfers even in offline conditions. Additionally, it integrates blockchain-based email functionality, allowing encrypted messages to be sent securely over a decentralized network, thereby enhancing data privacy and security. To further strengthen data integrity, the system incorporates the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized file storage, reducing reliance on centralized servers and minimizing data loss risks. By combining off-chain transactions, blockchain-based email, and IPFS storage, the system enhances efficiency, security, and reliability, offering a robust decentralized solution for financial transactions and secure communication. The data is distributed across all cryptocurrency users within the network. This ensures that when a user initiates a transaction, data mining processes are conducted.
Shamim Akhtar, Muhammad Taimoor, Ghulam Fatima, Hurma Islam
This research explores the transformative role of blockchain technology in ensuring secure and trustworthy digital transactions. With the increasing reliance on digital platforms across industries such as finance, healthcare, and supply chains, blockchain has emerged as a solution to the challenges posed by traditional centralized systems, including data breaches, fraud, and lack of transparency. The study investigates blockchain's decentralized structure, cryptographic security features, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts to evaluate how it enhances data integrity and trust in digital transactions. A qualitative approach was employed, utilizing case studies and a comprehensive review of existing literature. The results show that blockchain’s decentralization significantly reduces single points of failure, while its consensus mechanisms and smart contracts increase trust and automate transactions. However, challenges such as scalability, energy consumption, and regulatory concerns remain. The research highlights blockchain’s potential for transforming digital transactions but calls for further innovation to address these issues. The findings suggest that blockchain has the capacity to revolutionize secure transactions across various sectors but requires continued development to achieve widespread adoption and scalability.
As more organizations move to use the multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, the perimeter-based security model is insufficient for the concept of zero-trust security states. Thatently, curing this complex environment, It has “never trust, always verify”. Completely contradicting the conventional models, Zero Trust continually promotes authentication and validation of every access request (inside or outside the network perimeter). As they try to understand how to protect the isolation of tenants, stop alteration movements, and support identity cross services, the paper investigates the challenges and parts of zero trust taking effect in the multi-tenant cloud. Everything must always be authenticated, no matter the connection status, to ensure the user (only the user) has permission to do all the things they need. Further, it shows that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies can highly enhance the detection of threats and adaptive access control. It shall see an exhibited case study of a SaaS provider going from providing limited risk mitigation against these risks, such as credential stuffing, API abuse, and insider data leakage, to Zero Trust security. This paper discusses decentralized identity (DID), post-quantum cryptography, blockchain as immutable audit trails, and AI-led autonomous zero trust systems as some of the future emerging trends. As the world reaches the multi-tenant cloud architecture, they are ready to enhance cloud security further.
Aashish Kumar Jha, Mohammed Nihar N R, J Sankalpa, Chetana Prakash
ABSTRACT: As statistics is the backbone of the digital financial system dependence on centralized cloud storage structures makes users prone to troubles concerning statistics breaches operational price and lack of control this paper examines the deployment of a decentralized cloud storage DCS framework with the use of interplanetary file system IPFS and Ethereum blockchain clever contracts to triumph over those drawbacks the gadget proposed here improves protection and information availability by incorporating aes-256 encryption sharding of records and decentralized metadata control by the introduction of a working prototype based on react.js, Ethereum wallet, ether.js and solidity this mission illustrates the viability of a decentralized statistics garage whilst resolving troubles with latency user adoption and value effectiveness experimental consequences affirm enhancements in safety and availability establishing a strong platform for additional research on decentralized storage architectures
Explosion-proof apparatus is a must in hazardous areas especially in anindustrial setting where certification is required to meet certain safety levels.Conventional certification mechanisms tend to be slow, non-transparent and vulnerable to forgery of documents and delays, particularly in the context of cross border transactions.This article presents the architecture of a blockchain-based certification platform, which could contribute to transparency, traceability, and efficiency in the certification lifecycle of explosion-proof equipment.It includes Ethereum smart contracts, IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) to store the comprehensive test reports on a decentralized platform, and a role-based web application interface for different kinds of users such as manufacturers, testing labs, certification bodies, and field auditors.Smart contracts are responsible for generating, revoking and handling certificate access control, all certification metadata and file hashes are suitably safeguarded on the blockchain, allowing records to remain tamper-proof and verifiable.A working prototype was implemented in Goerli Ethereum testnet and developed as React application.js frontend, Web3.js, IPFS and Architecture for a Blockchain-based Certification Platform for Explosion-Proof Devices https://iaeme.com/Home/journal/IJCET499
A. Senthilselvi, M Eyadu Nandhan, R. Kishore, M Charan · 6 authors
With the widespread support of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the medical field also comes a realistic worry of the need to secure this information from unauthorized access. In traditional electronic health record management systems, centralized system approach puts up at risk of data invasions, mainly patient records which are very delicate and confidential. This paper describes an efficient cloud-based file sharing system for the storage and management of EHRs that takes advantage of cloud computing and blockchain technologies. The presented method implements dual-layer encryption which includes Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and Secured Hashing Algorithm-256 (SHA-256) hashing to assure the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of the EHRs. The use of a blockchain approach within the system bounds allows for elimination of even servers thereby enhancing how the information integrity is preserved. The electronic health records management system proposed in this paper eliminates the major concerns of data integrity associated with client-server-based systems and overcomes hematogenic challenges through maintaining patients’ associate’s privacy even as threats evolve in the CS world.
With the growing demand for data storage, cloud storage has become prevalent but has introduced significant security challenges, particularly in data deletion. Malicious cloud servers may fail to execute deletions properly, posing risks to data security and software updates. This paper proposes a blockchain-based verifiable data deletion scheme, leveraging blockchain to record deletion evidence and ensure transparency. The scheme enables mutual authentication between data owners and cloud servers through smart contracts. Upon successful authentication, the server deletes the data, generates deletion evidence organized via a Merkle tree, and stores it on the blockchain. The data owner can verify the deletion by comparing the server's evidence with blockchain-stored hashes. Simulations and security analyses on Ethereum demonstrate the scheme's ability to ensure each deletion operation without relying on trusted third parties, offering safety and traceability. Experimental results highlight its efficiency and practicality, making it decentralized. Meanwhile, it is of meaningful significance to improve the royal of the cloud storage services and the reliability of node management of multi-branch software.
Gaurav Naik, M D Manoj, S. Nithin, Y.K. Guruprasad · 6 authors
Existing e-voting systems aim to digitize voting but face challenges in security, transparency, and trust. Many rely on centralized architectures, this makes them susceptible to cyberattacks and unauthorized intrusions, data manipulation, and unauthorized access. These systems often lack mechanisms to ensure voter anonymity while maintaining vote integrity, raising concerns about privacy breaches and vote tampering. Auditing and verifying results is difficult, as tracing votes without compromising privacy remains a challenge. These limitations reduce public trust, especially in large-scale elections where doubts about system integrity can lead to disputes and unrest. A blockchain-based e voting system offers a decentralized, transparent, and tamper proof solution. Blockchain technology provides an immutable ledger, securing each vote against alteration or deletion. Decentralization eliminates the need for a central authority, reducing risks of hacking and fraud. Cryptographic techniques ensure voter anonymity while verifying vote authenticity, addressing privacy concerns. Real-time auditability allows independent verification, enhancing transparency and trust in the process. This approach strengthens security, improves reliability, and fosters a trustworthy election platform.
Yanghe Pan, Zhou Su, Yuntao Wang, Han Liu · 6 authors
Federated learning (FL) model marketplaces require qualified workers to collaboratively train customized models. However, recruiting optimal workers on a limited budget in non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data settings remains a fundamental issue. Moreover, inadequate quality verification exposes the marketplace to spoofing and poisoning attacks, while verifying data and model quality without accessing local storage remains a significant dilemma. To bridge the research gap, this paper proposes a knowledge-aware model customization scheme in FL model marketplaces, to facilitate zero-trust worker recruitment and verification while ensuring privacy preservation. Specifically, (i) we design a knowledge-aware quality evaluation mechanism by leveraging the knowledge of workers, i.e., soft-label predictions of their local models on a privacy-free reference dataset (provided by the customer), to assess their data quality in a privacy-preserving manner. (ii) We formulate the optimal worker recruitment problem under budget constraints as an NP-hard integer programming problem and design a dynamic programming-based optimal worker recruitment algorithm with budget feasibility and computational efficiency. (iii) We devise a two-stage zero-trust quality verification mechanism by utilizing zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to exclude distrustful workers, thereby preventing spoofing and poisoning attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme enhances model customization performance by up to 34.3% on label-skewed non-IID data and 36.2% on feature-skewed non-IID data compared with existing representatives.
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.
Abstract— The swift uptake of cloud computing services has brought with it new complexities in tracking and billing for resource usage, frequently resulting in disagreements between customers and service providers as a result of unclear pricing models. This study investigates the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to improve transparency, trust, and accuracy in cloud resource billing. By taking advantage of the distributed and immutable aspect of distributed ledgers, bill records can be recorded, stored, and audited in real-time by anyone involved in an immutable manner. This removes dependence on centralized bill authorities and reduces tampering and manipulation of the data. Our proposed blockchain framework tracks resource consumption metrics, such as compute time, storage, and bandwidth used, directly on a distributed ledger. Smart contracts eliminate manual billing computations and payments, providing consistency and fairness. With this system, users obtain verifiable information on their billing history, while providers enjoy fewer operational disagreements and higher customer trust. Our paper presents the system architecture, principal technical challenges, possible performance overheads, and feasible solutions for deployment at scale. Finally, this research illustrates how the convergence of distributed ledger systems with cloud billing systems presents a revolutionary entry point to the development of an increasingly open and responsive cloud economy. Keywords— Ledger, Blockchain, Billing , software.
The Blockchain-Based Secure Document Sharing project offers a decentralized approach to secure, transparent, and efficient document sharing, resolving the weaknesses of conventional centralized systems. Utilizing Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts, and the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS), the system provides immutability, strong access control, and auditability. Smart contracts handle document ownership, versioning, and permissioned sharing, while IPFS facilitates decentralized storage of encrypted files, with content identifiers being stored on-chain for integrity checks. The frontend, implemented in React with Web3.js integration, has a user-friendly interface for wallet management, document upload, and secure sharing using protected routes and Bootstrap to make it responsive. The backend, implemented with Express.js, performs file upload through Multer and emulates IPFS interaction, with a plan to fully integrate IPFS. Local development is done using Ganache and Truffle to test and deploy the blockchain. Key features are tamper-proof audit trails, attribute-based access control, and real-time global accessibility, making the system ideal for industries such as healthcare, finance, and education. Scalability and reliability challenges such as IPFS integration, Web3 provider error handling, and contract address configuration are being tackled to make the system scalable and reliable. Through blockchain's immutability coupled with IPFS's decentralized storage, this project presents a safe and affordable substitute to centralized document storage systems, while promoting compliance and trust as it simplifies collaboration. Planned for the future include layer-2 scalability solutions as well as wider testing to improve production readiness.
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.
Mayur Patel, Aditya Vishwakarma, Mohammad Kaif, Shahan Ali
Abstract: Online blockchain-based certificate generation and validation represent a crucial advancement in enhancing transparency, security, and efficiency within government operations. This system enables government organizations to securely issue, verify, and manage certificates, ensuring the integrity of essential documents such as birth certificates, educational diplomas, business licenses, and other critical records. The integration of blockchain technology into certificate management systems can significantly streamline government services while safeguarding against fraudulent activities, document tampering, and administrative errors.In recent years, however, blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to address these issues, offering a decentralized, tamper-proof system for the generation and validation of certificates. Blockchain, which is essentially a distributed ledger, stores data across a network of nodes, making it virtually immutable and highly resistant to alterations. Each record or transaction on the blockchain is cryptographically secured, ensuring that once a certificate is issued and recorded, it cannot be modified or deleted without detection
Dushyant Kumar Yadav, Hemlal Sahu, Dharminder Chaudhary, Cheng‐Chi Lee
ABSTRACT The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as a promising application capable of enhancing transportation efficiency and providing a variety of mobile services to drivers. This IoV enables real‐time data sharing among vehicles and infrastructure, allowing for better traffic flow, reduced congestion, and optimized routes. By providing vehicles with real‐time information about nearby vehicles, road conditions, and potential hazards, IoV can significantly reduce the likelihood of accidents and improve overall road safety. Given the openness, continuous data production, distributed environment, and self‐organizing nature of IoV, it is susceptible to numerous malicious attacks. To ensure the authenticity of mobile services within IoV, we have proposed a robust authentic blockchain–based multisignature algorithm with Ethereum consensus mechanism. Blockchain's decentralized nature reduces the risk of single points of failure, making it more resilient against hacking and unauthorized access. In this system, all the transactions recorded on the blockchain are immutable, ensuring that the data remain accurate and tamper proof. This is crucial for maintaining trust in the information exchanged between vehicles. This also eliminates the need for a central authority, blockchain enables peer‐to‐peer interactions between vehicles, enhancing efficiency, and reducing latency. This security of the algorithm is based on short integer solution assumption can provide security even in the presence of quantum computers. The proposed algorithm is computationally efficient, and it uses th‐degree truncated polynomial ring unit (NTRU)–generated lattice with simple polynomials multiplication over a finite field. The results confirm that our proposed scheme is effective in enhancing security within the IoV environment.
Interoperability is a fundamental challenge for longenvisioned blockchain applications. A mainstream approach is using Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to support interoperable off-chain execution. However, this incurs multiple TEE configured with non-trivial storage capabilities running on fragile concurrent processing environments, rendering current strategies based on TEE far from being practical. This paper aims to fill this gap and design a practical interoperability mechanism with simplified TEE as the underlying architecture. Specifically, we present IvyCross, a TEE-based framework that achieves lowcost, privacy-preserving, and race-free blockchain interoperability. IvyCross allows running arbitrary smart contracts across heterogeneous blockchains atop two distributed TEE-powered hosts. We design an incentive scheme based on smart contracts to stimulate the honest behavior of two hosts, bypassing the requirement of the number of TEE and large memory need. We examine the conditions to guarantee the uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium via Game Theory. Furthermore, an extended optimistic concurrency control protocol is designed to ensure the correctness of concurrent contracts execution. We formally prove the security of IvyCross in the Universal Composability (UC) framework and implement a prototype atop Bitcoin, Ethereum, and FISCO BOCS. Extensive experimental results on end-to-end performance and concurrency control demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of IvyCross.
While blockchain’s immutability ensures data integrity, it also poses significant challenges when dealing with illegal or erroneous data that require modification. The concept of redactable blockchain has emerged, utilizing Chameleon Hash (CH) and subsequent Policy-based Chameleon Hash (PCH) for controlled data editing. However, current redactable blockchain implementations exhibit significant limitations, particularly in their inability to separate data editing from policy modification and their insufficient support for decentralized management of diverse editing operations. To address these issues, this paper initially introduces the concept of Flexible Policy Chameleon Hash (FPCH), which integrates PCH with non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to enable enhanced policy management flexibility. Moreover, this paper proposes a Redactable Blockchain Framework with Fine-grained Access Control (RBFAC) based on FPCH. The RBFAC framework employs a hybrid cryptographic approach to separate the right of data editing from policy modification. The framework also provides essential functionalities, including editing accountability, key tracking and revocation mechanisms, and policy privacy protection. Finally, experimental evaluations demonstrate that the RBFAC framework maintains acceptable performance overhead while delivering these advanced features. The results indicate that the proposed solution addresses the limitations of existing redactable blockchain systems, offering a more flexible and secure approach to controlled data editing in blockchain environments.
Modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) generate large volumes of sensitive data, requiring secure management. Traditional centralized storage systems are vulnerable to breaches and unauthorized access, making them unsuitable for safeguarding CPS data. This paper presents a blockchain-based architecture integrating Hyperledger Fabric and Storj to enhance data security, integrity, and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric ensures data integrity and transparency through a tamper-proof distributed ledger, fine-grained a ccess c ontrol, a nd automated smart contract protocols. Storj provides decentralized storage, splitting encrypted data into segments across global nodes to eliminate single points of failure and improve redundancy. Experimental evaluation demonstrates a 20% improvement in data retrieval speed, 100% integrity accuracy, and 1,000 transactions per second with minimal CPU usage. Additionally, the integration of homomorphic encryption enables real-time computations on encrypted data while preserving privacy. The proposed framework addresses critical CPS challenges, delivering a scalable, secure, and resilient system for managing CPS data.
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.
With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), maintaining data integrity, confidentiality, and authentication is now an imperative challenge. Most conventional cryptographic solutions cannot satisfy the specific constraints of IoT environments, which include limited computational resources, energy efficiency, and scalability. This study proposes a lightweight hybrid cryptographic framework combining Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) and Verifiable Random Functions (VRF) with Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). The hybrid framework is intended to offer robust data integrity, secure authentication, and efficient encryption mechanisms with minimal computational overhead. Our solution makes use of AEAD (AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305) in order to establish both confidentiality and integrity within a single encryption process and with much less processing time than in traditional approaches such as AES-CTR with HMAC. Use of VRF guarantees that cryptographic algorithms result in verifiable randomness that increases replay attack and unauthorized entry security. ECDSA is utilized for lightweight digital signatures, providing non-repudiation without the computational overhead being higher than RSA-based integrity mechanisms. To ensure the efficacy of our methodology, we performed thorough benchmarking tests comparing AEAD + VRF + ECDSA with conventional cryptographic methods like AES-CTR + HMAC and integrity verification based on RSA. It is revealed by our benchmarks that our hybrid solution considerably cuts down encryption time, minimizes CPU utilization, and maximizes memory usage, thus being very suitable for resource-poor IoT devices. In contrast to AES-CTR + HMAC, which needs independent encryption and authentication phases, AEAD's hybrid approach has the least storage footprint and computational overhead. Furthermore, avoiding a dedicated verification step (necessary in HMAC-based designs) adds to system responsiveness. Our work adds to the literature through a scalable, effective, and secure cryptographic framework optimized for IoT use cases such as secure messaging, sensor data encryption, and access control in distributed systems. Real-world deployment in IoT platforms, post-quantum cryptographic augmentation, and implementing zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for improved privacy-preserving authentication are next steps. By solving major problems in IoT security, our hybrid approach provides an efficient yet reliable alternative to state-of-the-art cryptographic solutions to guarantee end-to-end data confidentiality and integrity within contemporary IoT infrastructures.