Abstract In the current digital era, the storage of electronic health records on centralized platforms presents significant integrity, privacy and security challenges. Further, access to this stored healthcare data should be quick and efficient, especially during emergencies. Blockchain and edge computing brought a great revolution in managing healthcare data by ensuring security, immutability, and decentralized data sharing with reduced latency. But, the integration of edge computing with the blockchain networks is still a gap to achieve ideal healthcare goals of data security with real-time data processing. The contribution of this work is two-fold. First, a novel deep reinforcement learning based medical data offloading scheme is proposed for offloading healthcare data to the nearby edge servers from the end users. The learning policy uses the proximal policy optimization algorithm for making the optimal offloading decision and minimizes the overall delay and energy consumption of healthcare devices and edge servers. Second, we proposed a secure, scalable, and consent-based data sharing scheme among multiple stakeholders such as patients, hospitals, doctors, healthcare research institutes etc. The EHR sharing scheme uses the AES and RSA algorithms for encryption, which ensures only authorized and consent-based access to the sensitive data stored in IPFS. The performance of the proposed offloading scheme is evaluated in terms of delay and energy consumption whereas data sharing scheme is evaluated in terms of latency and throughput using Hyperledger Besu and Hyperledger Caliper platforms. The experimental study exhibits that the proposed approach is both feasible and scalable, making it suitable for integration into the e-healthcare systems.
Dušan Mitrović, Ivan Milenković, Miroslav Minović
The growing use of blockchain in e-commerce has produced hybrid environments in which private enterprise ledgers and public blockchain networks operate side by side. Consequently, efficient and secure interoperability between these networks has become increasingly important. This study presents a cross-chain interoperability framework that links a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network with a public Ethereum network. The framework provides attestations of selected business events rather than moving assets. An interoperability smart contract on Fabric emits cross-chain events; an off-chain validator enforces uniqueness and replay protection; and a public verification contract on Ethereum records an immutable, publicly verifiable attestation of each event. The framework uses a two-of-three validator threshold to attest events, so safety holds as long as no more than one of the three validators is compromised. The prototype was evaluated by processing 21,000 events across sequential, concurrent, and peak-load workloads. On the local network, message validation averaged approximately 12 ms per event, and the interoperability layer added less than 200 ms of overhead per attestation. Sustained throughput ranged from 13.2 to 14.2 attestations per second, while the validator used approximately 16% mean CPU and less than 194 MiB of memory, with no sustained memory growth during the full experiment. On the Ethereum Sepolia public testnet, 55 transactions were confirmed with a 100% success rate and a mean confirmation time of 10,676.62 ms. Gas consumption stayed stable at about 51,743 gas per verification on the local network and about 189,092 gas on Sepolia, and the mean public testnet transaction cost was 0.000692 Sepolia ETH. Five adversarial tests were conducted, covering replay, forgery, malicious relayers, concurrent replay, and denial-of-service attacks. All five tests passed, including the rejection of 500 concurrent replay attempts with zero double registrations. The results show that the framework provides efficient, verifiable, and replay-resistant cross-chain interoperability suited to hybrid e-commerce ledgers.
Sangeetha Nagamani, Annamalai Selvarajan, Raghini Mohan, John Peter Vincent Paul · 6 authors
Secure and transparent water resource management is made possible by blockchain technology and its characteristics such as decentralisation, immutable records, and smart contracts. Tracking water consumption in real time is made possible by collaborating blockchain technology with Internet of Things–based sensors, authenticating data integrity and transparency in fetching records. Blockchain ensures the tamper-proof sustainability of water quality data for pollution prevention. It helps to secure real-time monitoring data permanently, including pH, turbidity, and pollutant levels, which enables regulators to address quality issues. The automation of water rights and allocation transactions in the water trade sector can be processed by blockchain-based smart contracts, which reduce transaction costs and administrative burdens. Water billing, permit issuing, and right transfers, which are part of water trading practices, are guaranteed by digital agreements. As a result, a peer-to-peer water auction can operate with reduced latency and robust fraud prevention. Hence, blockchain applications in water resource management remarkably enhance security, transparency, and efficiency for tracking, controlling pollution, and providing fair water trading through smart contracts.
Muhammad Farooq Shaikh, S. Hamza Hassan, Jawwad Shamsi, Alessia Maccaro · 5 authors
Background and objective The integration of blockchain and digital twin (DT) technologies is increasingly recognised as a promising approach for improving healthcare data integrity, interoperability, privacy, and clinical decision support. While digital twins enable dynamic patient modelling and predictive healthcare applications, blockchain provides secure data governance through decentralised trust, auditability, and access control. However, existing research remains fragmented, with limited synthesis of the architectural integration, regulatory readiness, ethical governance, and interoperability of blockchain-enabled healthcare digital twin systems. This systematic scoping review addresses these gaps by providing a comprehensive architectural and compliance-oriented analysis of the current evidence. Methods A systematic scoping review was conducted following PRISMA 2020 guidelines using Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science. From 148 identified records, 55 eligible studies published between 2020 and 2025 were included after duplicate removal and eligibility screening. Data were extracted on digital twin functionality, blockchain architecture, healthcare application domains, consensus mechanisms, privacy-preserving strategies, and regulatory and ethical alignment. Structured Python-based visual mapping and comparative analyses were performed to identify architectural, governance, and compliance patterns across the literature. Results The findings demonstrate that blockchain is predominantly employed to provide access control, audit logging, data integrity, consent management, and secure data provenance within healthcare digital twin ecosystems. Patient-level and EHR-centred digital twins represented the most mature application areas, whereas cross-domain and infrastructure-level frameworks dominated early architectural exploration. The review identifies recurring compliance-oriented architectural patterns while revealing substantial gaps in clinically validated deployments, interoperability with established healthcare standards, decentralised governance models, and formal implementation of GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant engineering practices. Comparative heatmap analyses further highlight the uneven maturity of ethical governance and regulatory integration across blockchain functionalities. Conclusion This review provides the first comprehensive compliance-oriented architectural synthesis of blockchain-enabled healthcare digital twin systems by integrating technical architecture, regulatory readiness, ethical governance, and privacy-preserving design patterns within a unified analytical framework. The proposed architectural mapping identifies critical research gaps in interoperability, governance engineering, consensus optimisation, and real-world clinical validation, providing a foundation for the development of trustworthy, GDPR/HIPAA-aligned, FHIR-compatible, and clinically interoperable healthcare digital twin ecosystems.
The use of a wireless sensor network is increasingly supporting e-governance functions such as municipal utility monitoring, environmental monitoring, grievance-based field reporting, and smart public service delivery. Most wireless sensor network architectures rely on a gateway or database. However, this introduces vulnerabilities to data integrity, node accountability, and auditability. This study examines transparency through a blockchain-enabled WSN architecture for e-governance. The study applies a reproducible Python-based Monte Carlo simulation with a fixed random seed, five node densities, three architectural scenarios, and 450 observations. The scenarios that are compared in this work are a normal WSN, a centralized secure WSN, and a permissioned blockchain-enabled WSN with smart-contract-based identity registration, hash-linked data records, trust scoring, and tamper verification. Descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, Welch t-tests, Pearson correlation, and multiple linear regression analysis. The blockchain-assisted WSN, as evidenced by the simulation findings of our project, produced the highest mean data integrity score, tampering detection rate, trust score, malicious node detection rate, and packet delivery ratio. The architecture also improved the composite service efficiency index relative to the conventional baseline, even though it introduced higher latency, transaction confirmation time, and energy consumption. The research indicates that the permissioned blockchain can enhance public-sector WSN transparency with edge aggregation and lightweight cryptographic operations along with carefully tuned endorsement rules. The methods presented in this study allow for scrutiny of secure WSN designs tailored for e-governance.
Secure and transparent attendance management has become increasingly important in educational institutions as conventional attendance systems often face challenges such as proxy attendance, unauthorized record modification, and limited traceability. Most existing solutions rely on centralized databases, making them susceptible to data tampering, accidental loss, and single-point failures. This paper presents a Blockchain-Based Attendance Management System that leverages blockchain technology to provide a decentralized and immutable mechanism for recording and verifying attendance information. The proposed framework integrates a React.js-based user interface with a Node.js and Express.js backend, while Firebase Authentication and Firestore manage user authentication and application data. Attendance records are securely stored through Ethereum smart contracts executed on the Ganache blockchain network, with transaction hashes linked to Firebase for efficient retrieval and verification. This hybrid architecture combines the scalability of cloud-based data management with the integrity and transparency of blockchain technology. Once attendance is recorded, the information cannot be altered without detection, ensuring reliable auditability and improved trust among students, faculty members, and administrators. The implemented system demonstrates secure attendance recording, fast verification, and efficient transaction management while reducing the possibility of record manipulation. The proposed solution offers a practical, scalable, and cost-effective approach for modern attendance management and provides a strong foundation for future enhancements such as biometric authentication, QR code-based attendance, and cloud-enabled blockchain deployment.
Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the healthcare industry, also known as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), have proven to greatly improve patient monitoring, diagnostics, and clinical decision-making. The increasing prevalence of resource-challenged medical devices, wireless connectivity, and cloud services, however, has brought new risks around security and privacy concerns that can now directly impact patient safety and data integrity. In this paper, a thorough study of 41 peer-reviewed research papers from January 2018 through May 2025 revealed the current state of security vulnerabilities and resilience strategies in healthcare IoT systems. It provides a comprehensive analysis of security threats at the device, network, and application levels such as unauthorized access, malware and ransomware, data breaches, and denial-of-service attacks delivered in a systematic manner. This contrasts with existing surveys, which consider single security mechanisms and improve upon various multi-layered security means such as AI-enabled anomaly detection, blockchain-based authentication and auditability, low-compute cryptographic techniques, and privacy-preserving methods such as federated learning. The outcomes also show that although emerging technologies add a great deal of security and trust capabilities, issues on scalability, interoperability, deployment, and regulations are not yet fully addressed. This review highlights important knowledge gaps and offers structured knowledge and future directions for research to address the design of secure, resilient, and practically deployable IoMT architectures for real-world healthcare environments.
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and healthcare present revolutionary chances to improve operational efficiency, patient outcomes, and tailored medication transformation. This paper thoroughly investigates IoT in healthcare using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to spot important trends and research gaps in current work. To achieve this, researchers have comprehensively analyzed 11,586 published papers from 2006 to 2024 which are extracted from Scopus database. Researchers have identified 2, 5, and 10 key topics to define significant areas of the research. Over time, it compares research topics to show how important areas, including wearable technology, artificial intelligence-powered analytics, blockchain for safe data management, and edge computing, have evolved. The paper additionally examines important issues, including data privacy issues, lack of interoperability, and restricted inclusiveness for underprivileged communities. Emphasizing inclusivity, ethical compliance, and pragmatic implementation tactics catered to different healthcare environments, a strategy framework is suggested to help solve these difficulties. This paper helps IoT implementation in healthcare advance by giving actionable insights, particular discoveries, and future research directions, thereby opening the path for more fair, efficient, and sustainable healthcare systems.
Network slicing and resource provisioning in 6G focus on creating multiple customized virtual networks over a shared infrastructure. However, these approaches also introduce challenges, like increased architectural complexity, higher implementation costs, security vulnerabilities between slices in resource optimization across highly dynamic and heterogeneous network environments. In this work, Exponentially Tactical Unit Algorithm (ETUA) is devised for network slicing in 6G. Initially, blockchain-enabled 6G network is simulated, and the set of features, like user device type, delay rate and packet loss rate are collected from various devices. Moreover, network slicing is done by ETUA that integrates Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) and Tactical Unit Algorithm (TUA). Finally, resource allocation is performed using Attention High-order Deep Network (AHoNet) by considering the parameters that includes bit error probability, sum rate and trust. The efficacy of ETUA is examined by bit error probability, utility and latency with 0.012, 0.950 and 0.509 Sec.
The rapid growth of AI-driven workloads, IoT ecosystems, and distributed digital services has exposed fundamental limitations in existing cloud and edge infrastructures, particularly in guaranteeing robust data privacy under emerging quantum threats. Current blockchain-based systems provide integrity and decentralization but rely predominantly on computational cryptography and access-control mechanisms, leaving them vulnerable to future quantum adversaries and large-scale inference attacks. In this paper, we introduce Data Communities as a novel paradigm for privacy-preserving, blockchain-enabled cooperative digital infrastructures, formalized within the Cooperative Digital Infrastructure (CDI) framework. Our approach integrates three complementary privacy protection layers: (i) MuReQua, a quantum-resilient blockchain consensus mechanism leveraging CQKD for cryptographic robustness against Shor-type attacks; (ii) DeSSE, an information-theoretically secure distributed storage model based on n × m fragmentation, ensuring zero information leakage below reconstruction thresholds; and (iii) a multi-tier data sovereignty model (C0–C3) enforcing policy-driven data locality and regulatory compliance across federated nodes. We formalize privacy guarantees through an adversarial model encompassing classical, quantum, insider, and governance-level threats, and demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves information-theoretic confidentiality, forward secrecy, and attack-resilient distributed governance. A privacy leakage analysis shows that the probability of data reconstruction under sub-threshold compromise is identical to zero, outperforming conventional blockchain storage models based on encryption alone. Simulation and case study results indicate that Data Communities achieve up to 99.999% service availability, 55% reduction in external data exposure, and 22–35% carbon-aware optimization, while maintaining strict privacy guarantees across distributed environments. Compared with existing blockchain systems (e.g., Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric), the proposed framework shifts privacy protection from access-control and pseudonymity to structural, information-theoretic privacy by design. Overall, the results establish Data Communities as a scalable and quantum-resilient foundation for next-generation privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructures, bridging distributed AI, secure storage, and cooperative governance under a unified formal model.
Ahmed A. Jasim, Noor Riyadh Issa, Hisham A. Shehadeh, Fadhil Mukhlif · 6 authors
Abstract The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which are deployed in harsh environments, are extremely susceptible to localized battery exhaustion as well as intelligent inside routing threats, especially sinkhole and data falsification attacks. In this paper, we present ECHVM (Enhanced Cluster Head selection by Voting and an ECC-based Blockchain Mechanism), a novel, secure, and energy-efficient routing framework to achieve an optimal trade-off between network security and hardware resource efficiency. We present the ECHVM protocol that combines Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with a lightweight, local distributed ledger to mitigate risks of centralized authority by transferring the verification of crucial network events from a single, highly vulnerable centralized alert sink node to a decentralized, voting-based consensus among neighboring nodes. In this study, a weighted voting algorithm based on node and distance proximity metrics is applied to cluster head selection, where a 51% neighbor consensus rule is leveraged to validate local ledger transactions against malicious acts. Moreover, a local energy density and topological communication geometry-oriented energy-efficient cluster head (CH) selection algorithm is crafted to ensure balanced CH distribution in the high-density areas of the network structure so as to avoid the premature energy hole problem. Using the standard first-order radio energy model, quantitative simulations performed in MATLAB show that ECHVM achieves a malicious node detection rate of 98.2% and extends the network lifetime by 30% compared to state-of-the-art protocols (e.g., ELSO and SEC-HDT) because of proactive topology defense and rapid node sleeping. The results of statistical validation using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test confirm that both the reduction in energy consumption and network longevity offered by ECHVM are highly significant ( p = 0.019), justifying ECHVM as a mathematically sound, permanent, scalable security framework suitable for resource-constrained, dense Internet of Things (IoT) and smart sensing applications for next-generation communication systems.
This study is based on proliferation of IoT devices has created demand for high-rate, low-cost microtransactions, yet conventional blockchains impose fees, latency, and throughput limits that hinder scalable IoT finance. This study aimed to evaluate a hybrid architecture that places microtransactions on a lightweight DAG(IOTA/Tangle-style) plane while periodically anchoring compact commitments to Ethereum to reconcile performance with public auditability. The study implemented a reproducible simulation that ingests IoT telemetry (TON_IoT-style), a DAG transaction and tip-selection model at the edge and samples Ethereum fee/confirmation priors from Google BigQuery public datasets to generate realistic on-chain settlement costs and latencies. Scenario attacks (flooding, replay, recipient-entropy) were injected, and detection models (sequence + +graph features) were evaluated. DAG operation yielded near instant local confirmation (≈1.4 s) and ≈1200 tx/s throughput versus ≈13.2 s and ≈14 tx/s on Ethereum. Periodic anchoring reduced amortized per-payment cost from ≈$0.72 (naive on-chain) to ≈$0.0144 with modest finality delay (median ≈600s), a ≈98% cost reduction. F1 detection was high (≈0.85-0.91) with an acyclic graph (DAG). Ethereum is a practical approach for transparent, secure IoT financial transactions since it preserves DAG performance while providing immutable auditability at negligible amortized cost. Exploring privacy-preserving anchors as well as multi-gateway resilience has become a stepping stone for future research.
Abstract The exponential growth of IoT networks has made the supply of trustworthy digital IDs more important than ever. Limitations in scalability, transparency, and resilience to single points of failure are some of the inherent issues with modern centralised identity management systems. These problems are exacerbated in distributed IoT systems since there is no central authority to rely on for communication and trust establishment among the many devices and various parties involved. By introducing SecureChain-ID, a system that uses blockchain technology to provide distributed identity issuance, authentication, and lifecycle management, this article aims to solve the restrictions that now exist. For resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the system's use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) provides digital signatures that are both lightweight and efficient. Credentials may be verified with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) as they do not divulge any personally identifiable information. The blockchain's smart contracts streamline the authentication and registration processes, enabling the widespread agreement on the smooth addition of new administrators and devices. The persistent documentation of all identity-related transactions ensures auditability and safeguards against manipulation. This includes updates, revocations, and access events. Unlike conventional approaches, SecureChain-ID establishes network-wide accountability and paves the way for decentralized governance to be aligned with administrative control, enabling flexible permissioning. Many Internet of Things (IoT) systems can benefit greatly from the proposed approach due to its emphasis on data security, low trust assumptions, and interoperability. This research successfully bridges the conceptual gaps between blockchain, identity, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems by introducing an efficient design that improves future cyber-physical systems' secure identification infrastructure.