A growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) is sustained by recent developments in networking cloud, edge computing, and big data processing. In today’s data-driven digital economy, IoT data security is quickly rising to the top of the value chain as it enables the development of numerous business models that offer a wide range of intelligent and pervasive services. But, if a suitable privacy-preserving mechanism is not in place these data, which, include sensitive personal information, may reveal the identities of related stakeholders. Remarkably, blockchain-based methods support the distributed nature of IoT while providing robust countermeasures to prevent data from being corrupted. This paper includes research papers that focus on blockchain technology and its key characteristics for Edge Computing privacy preservation. The research articles are analyzed by grouping them according to the blockchain-based privacy-preserving methods for edge IoT that were used in earlier studies. Additionally, the problems and research gaps found in the previous works are enumerated so that future researchers can improve their work and provide a solution. Software tools, technique classification, blockchain technologies, and use cases are some of the factors that are taken into consideration when analyzing the works reviewed in the literature.ABBREVIATIONS: IoT: Internet of Things; FL: Federated Learning; ZKP: Zero-Knowledge Proof; SMPC: Secure Multi-Party Computation; DP: Differential Privacy; DL: Deep Learning; EHR: Electronic Health Repository; AI: Artificial Intelligence; LSTM: Long Short-Term Memory; KPABE: Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption; GRU: Gated Recurrent Units; HABE: Hierarchical Attribute-Based Encryption; APoW: Adaptive Proof of Work; IoMT: Internet of Medical Things; RSU: Roadside Units; BFT: Byzantine Fault Tolerant; RP: Radial Point; GM-SSO: Genetically Modified Salp Swarm Optimization; SVM: Support Vector Machines; TP2SF: Trustworthy Privacy-Preserving Secured Framework; PCA: Principal Component Analysis; ePoW: Enhanced Proof of Work; XGBoost: Gradient Tree Boosting System; PSI: Privacy Set Intersection; WSN: Wireless Sensor Networks; PoT: Proof of Trust; CPPA: Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication; BTCPS: Conditional Privacy-Preserving Announcement Scheme; VANET: Vehicular Ad Hoc Network; OMLIDS-PBIoT: Optimal Machine Learning – Based Intrusion Detection System ForProtecting Privacy In Biomedical Internet Of Things; GEO: Golden Eagle Optimization; FS: Feature Selection; RVFL: Random Vector Functional Link Network; HBO: Heap-Based Optimizer; HPT: Hierarchical Purpose Trees; TS-PBAC: Triple Subject Purpose-Based Access Control; MCS: Mobile Cloud Services; IoHT: Internet Of Health Things; DQN: Deep Q-Network; IECDSA: An Intelligent Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm; IIoT: Industrial Internet of Things; DPoS: Delegated Proof of Stake; RDPoS: Reputation-Based Delegated Proof Of Stake; MC: Manage Contract; TIC: Token Issue Contract; RNN: Recurrent Neural Network; NTRU: Nth-Degree Truncated Polynomial Ring Units; PKI: Public Key Infrastructure; PTAS: Privacy-Preserving Thin-Client Authentication Scheme; ML: Machine Learning; DNN: Deep Neural Network; PPSF-BODL : Privacy-Preserving Secure Framework Using Blockchain; With Optimal Deep Learning; URC: User Register Contract; ML: Machine Learning
Abstract Blockchain technology offers a secure solution for managing sensitive data with Artificial Intelligence, supply chain, cloud computing, and healthcare applications. Its key features, confidentiality, decentralization, security, and privacy, enhance healthcare systems, especially when integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This integration improves communication between healthcare systems and IoT devices, increasing security, privacy, and operational efficiency. However, traditional healthcare systems face challenges like phishing, identity theft, and masquerading attacks. We propose a blockchain-based decentralized application to mitigate these risks and generate, maintain, and validate healthcare medical certificates. The application enables secure communication between hospitals, patients, doctors, and IoT devices using smart contracts for confidentiality and authentication. Our architecture utilizes Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof to maintain data integrity and privacy. We further integrate Blockchain Data Storage and the Inter-Planetary File System to reduce storage costs and enhance security through Ethereum smart contracts. An Intrusion Detection System monitors IoT traffic to detect potential security threats. Performance analysis demonstrates that this solution addresses key security and privacy challenges, offering an efficient and scalable framework for healthcare data management.
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.
Hafiz Muhammad Sanaullah Badar, Shafiq Ahmed, Nadeem Iqbal Kajla, Gaojuan Fan · 5 authors
The evolution of Smart Grids, a cornerstone of the Internet of Things (IoT), has revolutionized the electricity energy sector by enabling efficient, scalable, and secure energy management. As critical components of Smart Grid infrastructure, smart meters facilitate real-time data exchange between end users and service providers. However, transmitting sensitive data within these networks poses significant security challenges, particularly in the face of emerging quantum computing threats. Existing lightweight authentication and key exchange (AKE) protocols often fail to provide identity anonymity and impose substantial computational overhead, rendering them unsuitable for resource-constrained devices like smart meters. This paper presents a novel secure communication architecture for the Edge computing-assisted consumer devices and IoT (EACI) ecosystem, integrating Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to ensure robust data integrity and access control against classical and quantum-era threats. The architecture employs a lightweight consortium blockchain, implemented using the Hyperledger Fabric framework, to maintain tamper-proof records of authentication events and energy transactions. Regional Edge Gateways (REGs) preprocess data and perform localized cryptographic operations, minimizing computational demands on resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, an AI-driven Intrusion Detection System (IDS) enhances the framework’s resilience by proactively detecting and mitigating security threats in real-time. The proposed architecture undergoes rigorous formal security analysis, demonstrating its robustness against quantum and classical cyber threats. Performance evaluations reveal a reduction of 31% in computational overhead, a 45% decrease in communication overhead, and a 15% improvement in energy efficiency compared to existing lightweight protocols, underscoring its suitability for resource-limited environments like smart meters. These findings establish the proposed architecture as a scalable, secure, and efficient solution for Smart Grids and other IoT environments, ensuring long-term data protection, system reliability, and operational sustainability in the quantum computing era.
S. Prasad, Atheer Ahmed Alrashed, Mgm Johar, Anas Ratib Alsoud · 7 authors
ABSTRACT VANETs enhance traffic efficiency and road safety, but they can be attacked by malicious vehicles. These malicious vehicles can cause accidents or endanger lives by broadcasting false event messages and disrupting Internet of Vehicles applications. Before responding to sender messages, receiver vehicles must estimate the legitimacy and trustworthiness of the source vehicles. Existing solutions struggle to balance security and efficiency effectively. This paper introduces a model that combines the advantages of blockchain technology and trust model models to improve the trustworthiness, efficacy, and security of vehicular networks, alongside secure trust‐based optimized routing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the security and efficiency of the proposed model. The proposed model is adaptable to diverse VANET scenarios, addressing all security and privacy needs more comprehensively than current trust schemes. Efficiency analysis and simulation results show that our proposed framework outperforms baseline models, highlighting its security, effectiveness, and robustness in enhancing IoV communication security.
Abdul Razzaq, Muhammad Numair, Salman Ahmed, Muhammad Usman Akhtar
Advances in the healthcare sector need to secure efficient and decentralized systems to handle the large number of images and test reports. Traditional cloud-based healthcare systems pose crucial challenges, such as higher maintenance costs, significant storage demand, and, most importantly, privacy concerns. This chapter introduced the comprehensive patient-centric system for decentralized storage, secure medical data sharing, integrating blockchain technology and distributed file systems. The healthcare system leverages the IPFS and Ethereum blockchain to empowering scalable privacy protection of globally available storage of medical metadata. The framework enhances the accessibility and usability of incorporating a mobile offering for the patients, hospitals, and other stakeholders to interact with the decentralized system through the blockchain-integrated mobile application.This chapter provides an innovative approach to addressing the healthcare centralized data management limitations while ensuring patient privacy and data security.
Rana Muhammad Amir Latif, Muhammad Farhan, Jawad Ahmad, Leonardo Mostarda · 5 authors
The Medicine Supply Chain (MSC) faces critical challenges in traceability, transparency, and counterfeit prevention. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based solution using Ethereum smart contracts (developed in Solidity, deployed via Truffle, and tested on Rinkeby and localhost networks) to enhance MSC integrity. The framework introduces consumer authentication, Universal Product Code (UPC) registration, and transaction logging to ensure end-to-end drug traceability. By embedding multilingual UPCs (e.g., Urdu, Hindi), the system improves accessibility for diverse healthcare users, who can verify medicine authenticity via QR codes or a dedicated mobile app. The study examines scalability challenges (e.g., managing 100K+ UPCs in large healthcare networks) and evaluates the shifting dynamics among stakeholders (suppliers, processors, retailers). Public Blockchain implementation demonstrates potential for decentralized, tamper-proof record-keeping, though trade-offs in efficiency and adoption barriers persist.
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.
The Web of Things (WoT) represents an interconnected network of sensors and smart devices. It faces significant security and privacy challenges, including potential data breaches, unauthorized access issues, and concerning scalability problems. This paper introduces a blockchain-based solution that aims to enhance the security and reliability of the WoT. Taking advantage of the inherent transparency of blockchain's distributed ledger, the elimination of single points of failure through consensus algorithms, the enforcement of access control and privacy through smart contracts, and the assurance of data confidentiality through encryption, I propose an innovative design for the WoT that could guarantee enhanced security and trust. I also incorporate the use of a homomorphic hash function to further boost data privacy and integrity. This paper presents a comprehensive framework that employs blockchain technology to transform the current WoT into a more secure and trusted network, which I term the “Web of Trust”.
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.
W.T. KIM, Hocheol Nam, Muoi N. Tran, Amin Jalilov · 7 authors
Blockchain networks allow multiple client implementations of the same consensus algorithm by different developers to coexist in the same system. Ensuring correct implementations among these heterogeneous clients is crucial, as even slight semantic discrepancies in their implementations can lead to safety failures. While existing fuzzing frameworks have discovered implementation flaws in blockchain, they suffer from several challenges in testing them with sequences of conflicting blocks, called forks. Existing tools fail to adequately assess the forkhandling processes in blockchain implementations when relying on traditional code coverage feedback, which lacks the granularity needed to navigate the diverse and complex fork-handling scenarios. This paper introduces FORKY, a fork state-aware differential fuzzing framework designed to detect implementation discrepancies within the critical fork-handling process with its novel fork-aware mutation and fork-diversifying feedback mechanisms. We test FORKY on the two most influential blockchain projects: Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the representatives of the two major blockchain consensus algorithm families, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithms.
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.
With rapid urban population growth, particularly in developing countries, solid waste management has become challenging as the process has proved ineffective and dilapidated. However, the limited resources, outdated technology and inefficient systems of traditional waste management limit inappropriate resources, leading to unsanitary conditions, health risks and environmental hazards. The rest of this study elaborates on Blockchain Enabled Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) as a transformational answer to Smart Solid Waste Management Systems (SSWMS). This approach complements blockchain's data management capability with the VANET's real time communication while augmenting waste management operation's transparency, efficiency and security with the secure and immutable data provided by blockchain. A framework for the said dependency proposal is proposed which leverages Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to allow for data handling to be decentralized without a central authority so that waste collection data is spread across vehicles, roadside units (RSUs) and central control systems.
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.