Cloud-based academic environments such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), Open Journal Systems (OJS), institutional repositories, and web applications face increasing cybersecurity challenges due to heterogeneous users, distributed services, and extensive exposure to public networks. Existing security approaches remain fragmented, where machine learning focuses on threat detection, Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) emphasizes access control, and blockchain is primarily used for secure logging. The lack of integration among these components limits the ability of security systems to adapt dynamically to evolving cyber threats. This study proposes an Adaptive Cybersecurity Framework (ACF) that integrates unsupervised machine learning-based anomaly detection, a risk-based Zero Trust Policy Engine, and blockchain-based immutable audit logging within a continuous adaptive feedback loop. The framework was evaluated using 450,000 anonymized HTTP and Web Application Firewall (WAF) events collected from a multi-domain academic cloud environment consisting of LMS, OJS, repositories, and supporting web applications. The analysis revealed structured and repetitive attack behaviors dominated by automated endpoint probing and cross-domain propagation patterns, indicating ecosystem-level security threats. The proposed risk assessment mechanism demonstrated effective alignment between anomaly detection and policy-based decision making. Experimental results achieved an AUROC of 0.7296 for risk-based threat detection while maintaining an average decision latency of approximately 11 ms, indicating suitability for real-time deployment. Blockchain integration further provided verifiable, tamper-resistant audit trails for mitigation actions and policy enforcement activities. This study contributes an ecosystem-aware adaptive cybersecurity paradigm that bridges threat detection, policy enforcement, and auditability through a unified security architecture for Academic Cloud Environments.
The exponential emergence of cross-chain data sharing in blockchain-enabled IoT and cloud systems creates vital challenges in the scalability, privacy, and post-quantum security landscapes. To tackle these problems, we propose a hierarchical attribute clustering-attribute-based encryption (HAC-ABE) scheme in this paper, which offers a secure post-quantum cross-blockchain data exchange framework. The method utilizes hierarchical attribute clustering and lattice-based encryption to reduce the computation overhead while supporting fine-grained access control. It utilizes IPFS decentralized storage and smart contracts to achieve a transparent data exchange across chains. Experimental results show 9.7% faster computation time and much lower communication overheads than state-of-the-art ABE-based approaches, verifying its effectiveness and scalability for practical decentralized environments.
Newborn misidentification poses serious patient safety and accountability problems, but errors can be traced through the use of a blockchain to create an audit trail. However, a blockchain storing raw or even hashed biometric templates for individual identities is not acceptable for privacy reasons. This work redefines our prior work (1) to form a privacy-preserving audit protocol that isolates the processes of capturing a biometric and matching it against a database of known identities to an external Service Provider and the processing of the blockchain to a permissioned Ledger that contains only pseudonymous audit commitments related to keyed entries on the Ledger. This work describes an implementation of this protocol in Solidity 0.8.30 and provides metrics for the gas use and latency of the smart contract for 100 iterations of 100 total Enrollment and Verification Workflows each. Twenty Adversarial Functional Tests are also described that attempt to place the system into an invalid state, as well as four additional tests that assess the effect of batched submission to the smart contract of multiple keyed audit commitments. The smart contract processing throughput is also determined for a batch of submissions, finding a maximum local throughput of 60.2 tx/s. A further 50,000 randomized reference-model transitions of the system’s internal reference-model were then made (involving a total of 57,345,087 invariant checks, all of which passed), as well as a measurement of the time taken to generate an HMAC-SHA-256-sized commitment for 10,000 iterations (local median time = 0.002 ms). The results of this work provide a solid foundation for the blockchain component of BIBIS, but it is not intended to provide any insights into the accuracy of neonatal biometric matching, the presentation attack resistance of the system, or even the usability of BIBIS by clinical end-users. The results also do not comment on the finality of QBFT-based commits to a blockchain.
This paper seeks to develop an empirically tested theoretical model that measures the block chain related awareness, confidence, and perceived relevance regarding finances among employees in the Turkish financial services sector. From the existing literature on blockchain adoption, the acceptance of fintech, and trust-based investment behavior, the authors developed an initial item pool consisting of 14 items. Content validation was done through experts followed by a pilot. Primary data was collected from 450 finance professionals working in the banking, treasury, risk, and accounting departments of different companies within Istanbul. The questionnaire was filled out by the respondents during the period March to April 2025 and was distributed online. Internal consistency was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, while the structure of the underlying scale was investigated by Principal component analysis with oblique rotation. This analysis was complemented with item analysis through corrected item-total correlations and calculation of communalities. The data quality for conducting factor analysis were validated by KMO and Bartlett’s test of sphericity. From the results of the two-factor solution, the total variance explained was 85.83%. The first factor covered perceptions pertaining to blockchain awareness and informational engagement while the second predominately covered confidence in blockchains financial functionality and trustworthiness. The final structure is comprised of 14 items that have high loadings and little redundancy. The results indicate that the scale is not only clear-cut conceptually and statistically, but also provides a consistent measure for further studies regarding the perception and acceptance of technology in the finance domain.
As the digital landscape expands, centralised cybersecurity frameworks grow increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated threats, creating single points of failure and targets for adversarial data manipulation. While AI enables real-time threat detection and big data analytics, its centralised deployment limits efficacy and exposes training data to poisoning and evasion attacks. To address this, the AICyber-Chain model proposes a distributed framework combining parallel AI and blockchain architectures. It leverages a hybrid Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) mechanism with IPFS and Private Data Centres (PDCs) for secure decentralised storage and processing. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) refine security rules, while Ethereum-based smart contracts enable automated responses and trustless data sharing. Results on the Rinkeby test network show 1.8× faster authentication, 25% lower gas consumption, F1 score of 0.92, and 1.2 s response time, with a medical data sharing use case ensuring data provenance and tamper-proof control.
As the growth of the FinTech platforms continues, there is an increasing demand for intelligent, secure and traceable solutions that can provide real-time detection of fraudulent transactions and shield financial records from manipulation. In this research, an Artificial Intelligence-powered blockchain framework, combining machine learning for fraud detection and permissioned blockchain for validation, was proposed. It was found that ensemble models performed better than a linear baseline. The overall best balance of precision, specificity and F1 score was obtained with the Random Forest model, and the highest precision–recall was obtained with the Extra Trees model, with fraud recall slightly better. In addition, feature-importance analysis revealed a small number of transaction attributes, which were anonymised, that most significantly affected fraud classification. The chosen model was then connected to a prototype of a chained hash blockchain that preserved the hashes of transactions, the time, the predicted probability of fraud, the validation result, and the version of the model. Through hash inconsistency, the prototype was able to detect any transaction modifications which might have been made on purpose and successfully ensured ledger integrity. The results illustrate how both AI and blockchain technologies complement each other. AI is effective in detecting fraud accurately and on time, and blockchain enhances the traceability, auditability and tamper resistance of transactions.
In today's era, securing data related to environmental and forest department has become a crucial aspect. Integrating blockchain based technologies with the forest data management is an effective solution. Blockchain technology such as Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain. It can be helpful in storing the forest data in a more accurate, secure and tamper-proof manner. In this work a Hyperledger Fabric based framework has been developed to store the forest data in a secure and cost effective manner. The developed system can be used in the forest department to improve security and to monitor forest activities like illegal logging. In the developed system all the records are stored in an immutable manner. Its decentralized and permissioned nature helps to prevent any unauthorized participants, which means it only allows the participants that are authorized or permitted to perform within the network. The proposed technique has been implemented on Fabric 2.5 Test-Network. Performance analysis revels that the proposed system can be implemented in real time.
The rapid digitalization of healthcare has led to the generation of vast amounts of sensitive patient information, increasing the need for advanced security solutions beyond traditional centralized systems. This study examines the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology as a transformative approach to healthcare data security. Conventional electronic health record systems often face challenges such as single points of failure, limited transparency, and vulnerability to cyber threats. Blockchain addresses these issues by providing a decentralized and immutable ledger that ensures data integrity, traceability, and secure record management through cryptographic techniques and consensus protocols. In parallel, AI strengthens security by enabling intelligent threat detection, predictive analytics, and adaptive authentication mechanisms. Machine learning algorithms continuously analyze network activities and user behaviors to identify potential breaches and insider threats in real time. The combination of AI and blockchain creates a synergistic framework in which AI enhances blockchain efficiency, while blockchain provides a transparent and trustworthy environment for AI-driven data processing. The study further explores the role of blockchain-secured federated learning, which enables collaborative model training across healthcare institutions without exposing sensitive patient data. Key challenges, including interoperability, scalability, regulatory compliance, and integration with legacy systems, are also discussed. Additionally, patient empowerment is enhanced through self-sovereign identity models that grant individuals greater control over their personal health information. Despite challenges related to computational complexity and standardization, the convergence of AI and blockchain offers a proactive, resilient, and privacy-preserving security architecture for modern healthcare. Future research should focus on lightweight cryptographic solutions, quantum-resistant security mechanisms, and governance frameworks for decentralized healthcare ecosystems. Overall, this integration represents a significant step toward secure, transparent, and patient-centered digital healthcare systems.
The mushrooming digitalization of industries has heightened the need to have secure and resilient system design as well as smart system design that is prone to address intricate cyber threats and data breaches. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain have become the new influential technological innovations that could contribute greatly to the security, visibility, and reassurances of any digital ecosystem. AI can be used to provide smart threat detection and predictive analytics, intelligent decision-making, and blockchain can be employed to provide decentralization trust, immutability, and secure data sharing. The chapter discusses the prospects of AI and blockchain in the design of secure digital architectures and how the two can be used concurrently to enhance cybersecurity, keep data intact, and ensure operational resilience. It talks about architectural structures, practical implementation in industries, and ethical or regulatory implications as well as the future opportunities to create a solid and reliable digital systems in a more globalized world.
The multiplication of digital infrastructures and cloud services and of cyber-physical systems connected with each other has resulted in the significant growth of cybersecurity challenges. Traditional security mechanisms are usually not qualified to process large quantities of security data and identify complex cyber threats in real-time. The combination of artificial intelligence (AI), parallel computing, and blockchain technologies show a promising way forward on creating secure, scalable and resilient cybersecurity frameworks for distributed digital infrastructures. This Chapter puts forth a conceptual framework that incorporates parallel computing architectures and block-chain enabled security mechanisms in order to increase the efficiency and trustworthiness of AI-enabled Cybersecurity systems. Parallel computing helps high-performance processing of big amounts of network traffic and security logs, so that AI models can perform better analysis of picker threat patterns and find out anomalies more efficiently.
Cryptocurrency users have increasingly become targets of phishing and scam attacks. To mitigate these threats, leading crypto wallets (e.g., MetaMask) have introduced transaction simulation, which previews a transaction's balance changes before on-chain execution. While effective against traditional fund-draining attacks, we show that this defense can itself be exploited by a new phishing technique, which we term transaction simulation phishing. This attack uses carefully crafted smart contracts whose execution depends on dynamic blockchain state, causing simulations to display benign or profitable outcomes while the actual on-chain execution redirects users' funds to attacker-controlled addresses. We present the first comprehensive study of transaction simulation phishing. We first develop a taxonomy of phishing contracts that can be utilized to facilitate this attack. Then, we propose SIMGUARD, a bytecode-level detection system that combines static and dynamic program analysis to identify phishing contracts. Applying SIMGUARD to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Polygon, we detect over 4,000 phishing contracts deployed between August 2024 and June 2025. Our analysis identifies more than 5,700 victims and approximately $3.48 million USD in losses, 91.5% of which occurred on Ethereum. Moreover, our clustering result reveals that the largest phishing contract cluster alone accounts for about 83% of the total losses. These results expose a critical weakness in current wallet defenses and highlight the urgent need for more robust transaction simulation mechanisms.
Automated market makers exchange assets through liquidity pools whose quoted prices depend on their reserves, with constant product pools being the most common. When such pools reside on different blockchains or shards, a sequence of swaps cannot in general be executed atomically. Aanes et al. introduced lock-swaps and retroactive constant product liquidity pools to provide price guarantees for such a setting. A retroactive pool implicitly maintains a virtual pool for each possible execute/cancel resolution of its active locks. In the presence of active locks, serving a new swap request requires computing a safe quote; a quote with an output that does not exceed the minimum possible output, taken over all virtual pools. The quote being safe is a hard constraint ensuring the integrity of the pool. A soft constraint is to make the quote as close to the minimum possible output as possible. Aanes et al. gave a simple and efficient algorithm for computing the exact minimum when unresolved provides and reclaims of liquidity do not coexist, showed by an explicit example that the algorithm fails in general, and left the computational complexity of the general case open. In this paper, we show that unless P is equal to NP, there is no polynomial time algorithm that computes in the general case a safe quote with any fixed multiplicative approximation ratio (e.g., 50%) relative to the exact minimum. This seems like a severe obstacle for deployment of the lock-swap functionality. However, we also present two simple and practical algorithms for computing safe quotes that have input-dependent approximation ratios that are likely to be satisfactory in practice, thus circumventing that obstacle.
Xiaoye Zheng, Yujing Chen, Minghao Wu, David Lo · 8 authors
Solana is an emerging blockchain platform designed for high throughput and low transaction fees, making it inexpensive to submit transactions at scale and, consequently, increasing exposure to bot spamming and related financial exploitation. Solana bots are typically off-chain software systems that operate in a competitive on-chain execution environment by constructing and submitting transactions, and the bot-related transactions on the decentralized exchanges exceed 250 million dollars in daily trading volume in January 2026. Prior studies on Solana have examined system performance, smart-contract security, and specific on-chain phenomena. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of what Solana bots implement in practice and how these implementations manifest as observable on-chain execution fingerprints. To address this gap, we performed a large-scale empirical study of Solana bots from two complementary views: (i) 586 bot repositories collected from GitHub, and (ii) 200 bot addresses on Solana, with over 44 million on-chain transactions. Our study derives an implementation-grounded taxonomy of Solana bots comprising 15 categories grouped into five domains (e.g., Trading Operations, MEV, and On-chain Analytics), identifies a largely shared five-stage operational pipeline manifested in bot implementations, and uncovers systematic variation in on-chain trading behaviors of Solana bots across diverse trading platforms and assets. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions, and provide recommendations for building and operating bots on the Solana blockchain.
This article presents the DigInTraCE Blockchain Module, a secure and scalable framework for managing Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and traceability data across industrial supply chains. Built on Hyperledger Fabric, the solution combines distributed ledger technology, cloud-native infrastructure, smart contracts, and standardized EPCIS 2.0 traceability to enable trusted collaboration among multiple stakeholders. The technical article describes the platform architecture, governance mechanisms, secure API integration, identity management, and blockchain-based validation processes that support transparent, interoperable, and auditable product lifecycle information. The proposed framework provides a robust foundation for future Digital Product Passport implementations and circular industrial value chains.
To managing identities in a secure and decentralized manner, new opportunities have emerged because of recent breakthroughs in blockchain technology and biometric authentication. Blockchain is different from traditional biometric systems in that it is an unchangeable, distributed ledger that runs safe, decentralized code. Traditional biometric systems store data in one location and can’t be updated. Traditional biometric systems have some flaws, including template tampering, channel interception, and comparator overrides. So, the proposed work presents a Distributed Multimodal Biometric Security System with Blockchain to handle such issues. This system uses 3D face and 3D ear biometrics with blockchain technology, which comprises IPFS, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. Features from 3D face and 3D ear are embedded into a single multimodal template, which then undergoes encryption and storage on IPFS via content-addressed storage. The Content Identifier (CID) and data are then archived by smart contracts on the blockchain to maintain data integrity, security, verifiability, and immutability. In this way, a person can prove his identity without using any central services, further improving privacy. Blockchain consensus and the smart-contract-based access control mechanism further provide security, audibility, and simplicity to P2P transactions in biometric enrolment testing results show that feature extraction takes from 120 ms to 300 ms, uploading to IPFS takes between 200 and 600 ms, and completing blockchain transactions on local private network takes from 0.5 to 1 s, using 117,519 gas per enrolment. Additional analysis on the Ethereum Sepolia test network reveals that transaction fees change depending on network conditions, but gas consumption stays deterministic. The suggested solution is resistant to typical attacks like replay, interception, and template alteration; it is also irreversible, revocable, and unlinkable, according to security analysis conducted under a formal adversarial model.
Rodrigo Jara Espinoza, Yohamin Nafit Pimentel Alarcon, Angelo Rodrigo Taco Jiménez, Fabricio Martin Chavez Rodriguez
Quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical asymmetric cryptography, which is essential for ensuring confidentiality, authentication, and key exchange in contemporary digital infrastructures. Although post-quantum cryptography (PQC) provides mechanisms that resist quantum attacks, its implementation in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is challenged by constrained resources, including limitations in computation, memory, energy, latency, and bandwidth, and the heterogeneity of devices. This paper offers a comprehensive narrative review of PQC approaches applicable to IoT, systematically organizing 30 peer-reviewed studies published between 2022 and 2026 across four layers: device, communication, distributed trust, and application. Additionally, the review examines two cross-cutting dimensions, privacy and side-channel resistance. The analysis indicates a significant prevalence of lattice-based schemes, hybrid strategies, and integrations with blockchain technology, zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, AI, and Zero Trust architectures. Notably, key gaps remain in side-channel evaluation, migration pathways, deployment costs, and real-world validation—issues that are particularly critical given the long lifecycles of IoT devices and the ongoing threat of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks.
We examine the possible asymmetric relations between returns and changes in realized moments in the Bitcoin market by employing the quantile regression models (QRMs) which can account for investors’ heterogeneity. First, our findings confirm the existence of asymmetric return-volatility relation in the BTC market. Second, regarding the relations between returns and realized skewness, the negative and positive returns show larger impacts in lower and upper quantiles, respectively. Third, the relation between return and kurtosis exhibits similar asymmetric pattern to that of return-volatility. The empirical findings can be supported by behavioral theories including representative bias and affect heuristics.