SATHISHKUMAR RANGANATHAN, Muralindran Mariappan, M. Karthigayan
Swarm robotics is an emerging field capable of accomplishing complex tasks through collective behaviour. However, it continues to face persistent challenges in secure communication, decentralized decision-making, and scalability. To operate effectively in resource-constrained environments, swarm networks require a decentralized mechanism that is secure, fast, and efficient. Although many studies have explored the use of blockchain technology for swarm robotics, existing blockchain consensus algorithms such as Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), and their variants remain unsuitable due to high computational complexity and risk of stake centralization. To address these challenges, we introduce the blockchain-based Rotational Leadership Role (RLR) consensus algorithm, a voting-based consensus re-engineered from the Raft approach, together with Decentralized Task Authorization and Validation (DeTAV), a token-based mechanism for context-aware task validation. This design ensures efficiency, security, and scalability in swarm robotics and drone systems. RLR is lightweight and well suited to operate within the limited computing resources of small robots or aerial drones. To validate its performance, a custom-built robotic simulator was developed as part of this research. Experiments conducted with up to 70 concurrent robots demonstrated that RLR consumed under 90 MB Random Access Memory (RAM) and 12% Central Processing Unit (CPU), whereas PoW required 460 MB RAM and 27% CPU with a minimum difficulty level of 21, reflecting an 80% reduction in memory usage and a 55% reduction in CPU consumption. Scalability tests with 4 to 70 robots further revealed RLR’s scalability with an average of 78% higher throughput, 47% lower election latency, and 34% lower consensus latency. Additionally, under the simulated attack scenarios and assuming uncompromised cryptographic keys, DeTAV’s context-based validation consistently achieved 100% success in detecting and isolating Byzantine nodes, while reducing Quality of Detection (QoD) time by 67%. Collectively, these results confirm that RLR with DeTAV effectively meets the efficiency, security, and scalability requirements of swarm robotic and drone networks.
This paper introduces DMind-3, a sovereign Edge-Local-Cloud intelligence stack designed to secure irreversible financial execution in Web3 environments against adversarial risks and strict latency constraints. While existing cloud-centric assistants compromise privacy and fail under network congestion, and purely local solutions lack global ecosystem context, DMind-3 resolves these tensions by decomposing capability into three cooperating layers: a deterministic signing-time intent firewall at the edge, a private high-fidelity reasoning engine on user hardware, and a policy-governed global context synthesizer in the cloud. We propose policy-driven selective offloading to route computation based on privacy sensitivity and uncertainty, supported by two novel training objectives: Hierarchical Predictive Synthesis (HPS) for fusing time-varying macro signals, and Contrastive Chain-of-Correction Supervised Fine-Tuning (C$^3$-SFT) to enhance local verification reliability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DMind-3 achieves a 93.7% multi-turn success rate in protocol-constrained tasks and superior domain reasoning compared to general-purpose baselines, providing a scalable framework where safety is bound to the edge execution primitive while maintaining sovereignty over sensitive user intent.
We introduce FlashChain, a decentralized framework that integrates IO-aware attention mechanisms—especially FlashAttention—into scalable, trustless AI systems. As Transformer-based models become foundational to Web3 infrastructure (e.g., DAOs, decentralized search, autonomous agents), their quadratic compute and memory bottlenecks present critical challenges. FlashChain adapts block-sparse FlashAttention into a modular architecture optimized for multi-node, low-bandwidth environments typical of blockchain and edge networks. We propose a hybrid protocol combining attention kernel optimization with zero-knowledge verifiability, enabling real-time, trustless AI inference across distributed nodes. Benchmarks show 3–5× speedups and up to 30× gas savings per inference compared to baseline on-chain models.
Xuehan Li, Tao Jing, F. Richard Yu, Hongwei Wang · 9 authors
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) enhance traffic efficiency and safety via massive data-driven computation and decision-making. The computational demands of massive data challenge centralized cloud networks, leading to a novel CAV paradigm supported by mobile edge computing (MEC) and built on Web3. CAVs in Web3 can efficiently and securely offload compute-intensive tasks to edge devices in a decentralized and self-controlled manner, necessitating dependable task offloading schemes. However, existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based offloading schemes face two challenges: overlooking security risks like privacy exposure in dependability definitions, while being constrained by reward function formulation, resulting in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose a dependable offloading scheme based on intelligence and active inference for CAVs in Web3. First, we introduce a dependable offloading framework utilizing double-layer blockchain and decentralized identifiers to ensure offloading source dependability. Then, by introducing a security-measuring dependability metric called cost from energy consumption, delay, and privacy exposure risk (cEDP), we formulate the dependable offloading optimization problem from an intelligence and active inference perspective, enabling higher-level environmental cognition without rewards. The problem is solved by the proposed intelligence-based active inference (INAI) algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that reward-free INAI outperforms mainstream DRL and heuristic approaches in convergence, efficiency, and generalization capabilities.
This research presents the design and implementation of the Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT), a novel framework leveraging Web3 architecture to enhance the security and authentication of assets in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) for smart cities on a private blockchain. Unlike traditional non-fungible tokens that primarily identify and distinguish financial assets, existing approaches lack robust mechanisms for attributing and authenticating CPS assets such as owners, users, and IoT-enabled smart devices. DSCoT addresses this gap by introducing an extended ERC721 protocol, enabling IoT-enabled devices to have unique blockchain identities similar to user accounts, which enhances device management and tracking. Novel smart contract modules facilitate secure identification and authentication of CPS assets. Evaluated results on a private Hyperledger Besu blockchain show that DSCoT achieves significant performance improvements, including sub-second latency (∼0.1–0.5 s for application programming interface (API) calls), minimal transaction costs (∼0.01–0.05 USD), and a high processing capacity (∼1000 transactions per second (TPS)). These results, along with improved security through immutable authentication records, demonstrate DSCoT’s effectiveness as a scalable and secure solution for smart city CPSs.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Abstract The rapid development of Cloud-IoT computing environments enables intelligent services, but raises serious privacy and trust challenges due to massive distributed data generation. This paper proposes a verifiable multi-layer privacy-preserving Cloud-IoT computing framework that integrates differential privacy, secret sharing, and gradient masking within a cloud-edge-end collaborative architecture. An adaptive differential privacy mechanism dynamically adjusts noise intensity according to data sensitivity and training dynamics, while edge intelligence supports efficient pre-aggregation and privacy measurement. Extensive experiments in a real Cloud-IoT environment with 200 terminal devices demonstrate that the proposed framework improves model convergence speed by 37.8%, reduces communication overhead by 89.1%, and decreases privacy leakage risk by up to 82.9% compared with the DP-FedAvg and SecAgg baselines. Meanwhile, it maintains 91.3% model accuracy, suppresses membership inference attack success rates to 52.1%, which is close to the random-guessing baseline (50%), indicating that the attacker’s advantage is largely suppressed. The framework introduces only 3.2% additional verification overhead through a lightweight zero-knowledge proof mechanism. These results indicate that the proposed approach effectively balances privacy protection, verifiability, and system efficiency, providing a practical solution for large-scale Cloud-IoT applications in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and financial services.
Syed Raza Abbas, Zeeshan Abbas, Mobeen Ur Rehman, Seung Won Lee
Background Blockchain is increasingly explored as an infrastructure to mitigate data fragmentation, security incidents, and limited patient control in digital health ecosystems. This systematic review analyzed applications of blockchain in smart health systems, with a focus on security models, interoperability approaches, and integration with Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). Methods Following PRISMA 2020, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Springer, and Google Scholar were searched for studies published between January 2019 and August 2025 using a predefined strategy combining the terms (“blockchain” OR “distributed ledger”) AND (“healthcare” OR “medical” OR “health records”) AND (“security” OR “privacy” OR “interoperability”); of the 1847 records screened, 26 studies met the eligibility criteria. Results Across these studies, blockchain most consistently strengthened electronic health record management by providing cryptographic access control, tamper-evident and immutable audit trails, and support for cross-institutional data exchange. In four multi-institutional settings, coupling blockchain with AI enabled privacy-preserving federated learning for collaborative diagnostics without centralized data pooling. However, several technical and regulatory constraints were reported, including limited scalability (median throughput <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mo>≈</mml:mo> </mml:math> 850 transactions/second vs. >10,000/seconds typically required for national infrastructures), high energy consumption in proof-of-work based schemes, and unresolved tension between immutable ledger storage and data protection rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation “right to be forgotten.” Conclusion Overall, the evidence indicates that blockchain is a credible enabler of secure, interoperable, and patient-governed health data sharing, provided that future deployments incorporate Layer-2 or comparable scalability mechanisms, adopt energy-efficient consensus protocols, and operate within clearer regulatory guidance on the permanence of clinical data.
Mnemosyne: Post-Quantum Distributed AI Infrastructure via Physical Security Barriers, Speculative Consensus, and Proof-of-Useful-Work on Heterogeneous Edge Networks Overview Mnemosyne is a theoretical framework and system design for running large language model (LLM) inference on heterogeneous edge devices — from Raspberry Pi to high-end workstations — with privacy guarantees that remain valid even after quantum computers break all existing cryptographic assumptions. This paper presents 14 original theorems and 3 new network protocols, spanning five interconnected layers: Layer 1 — OS-Level Memory Management (Ch. 3.1)Formalizes a 6-tuple system model covering semantic-aware LRU page replacement, zero-copy mmap, and delta encoding. Defines four system invariants verified via TLA+ specification. Layer 2 — Information-Theoretic Compression (Ch. 3.2–3.4, Theorems 5.1–5.3)Proves that delta encoding of LLM embedding sequences achieves a lower differential entropy bound when adjacent vector correlation ρ > 0.5. Static analysis of LLaMA-2-7B confirms ρ ≈ 0.85, yielding a theoretical compression gain of ~10.88× over FP16. Full invertibility and floating-point stability bounds are proven. Layer 3 — Thermodynamic Privacy Guarantee (Ch. 5–6, Theorems 7.1–8.4)The core contribution of this paper. Mnemosyne's privacy guarantee is grounded in Landauer's Principle and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not computational hardness assumptions. Theorem 8.3 proves that exhaustive reconstruction of compressed embeddings requires a minimum energy of 10^{38,778} joules — approximately 10^{38,709}× the total energy of the observable universe. This makes Mnemosyne the first federated learning system, to our knowledge, whose privacy bound is elevated to the level of a physical law. The system is formally characterized as an Inverse Maxwell's Demon: it actively amplifies entropy to make information reconstruction thermodynamically infeasible, rather than computationally difficult. Layer 4 — Distributed Consensus (Ch. 7, Theorems 9.1–9.2)Proves the existence and feasibility of a Global Decentralized Compute Grid (GDCG) across heterogeneous hardware. Introduces a Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) extension of the MESI protocol with three new states (RS, PF, EC), enabling zero-copy memory sharing across devices. Theorem 9.2 proves that the system-recognized Modified state exists in at most one node among all nodes (including Byzantine nodes) at any time. Layer 5 — Economic Incentive Model (Ch. 7.4, Protocol 2)Defines Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW), a five-dimensional incentive function replacing wasteful Proof-of-Work mining with verifiable AI inference contributions. Projected annual reward: USD 100–500 per edge device. Key Contributions First federated learning system with privacy guarantee grounded in the Second Law of Thermodynamics 14 original theorems spanning information theory, thermodynamics, distributed systems, and formal verification 3 new network protocols (BFT-MESI extension, PoUW, QClock consensus) Formal verification via TLA+ and Z3 SMT Solver Minimum hardware requirement: 8 GB RAM (ARM Cortex-A76 class), enabling LLaMA-2-7B inference on commodity edge devices Keywords Edge AI · LLM Inference · Landauer's Principle · Post-Quantum Security · Delta Encoding · Product Quantization · Byzantine Fault Tolerance · Distributed Systems · Information Thermodynamics · Maxwell's Demon · Proof-of-Useful-Work · Federated Learning
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Abdullah M. Baqasah, Majed Alsafyani, Hamed Alsufyani · 6 authors
The revolution in Blockchain Distributed Ledger Technology (BDLT) is changing conventional structures and creating previously unattainable opportunities across a variety of industrial fields. This study explores new developments, opportunities, and trends while tackling important issues that highlight the revolutionary potential of BDLT. For secure, automated, and dependable ecosystem management, it focuses on innovations like Denaturalized Finance (Defi), chaincode, and BDLT interface with the Internet of Things (IoT). The investigation of hybrid blockchain models, which combine the benefits of private and public blockchains, is a novel component of this research. It provides a customized strategy to guarantee improved scalability, privacy, and performance. Conversely, this study highlighted the critical function of Hyperledger, a modular framework that makes enterprise-level blockchain solutions possible. Thus, Ethereum is a flexible platform with strong chaincode capabilities that facilitate the creation of Distributed Applications (DApps). Such opportunities for advancements are evaluated closely in order to demonstrate how they contribute to practical uses and innovations unique to a given sector. To improve worldwide acceptance, the paper also presents Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in order to demonstrate the existing innovative frameworks, especially Hyperledger Technology (HT) for resolving constraints such as consensus protocols for energy efficiency and adaptive regulatory models. For technological experts, industrial developers, and third-party policymakers seeking to harness BDLT's disruptive capabilities while navigating its complexity, this paper offers new viewpoints and practical insights to help close the gap between theoretical innovation and real-world applications.
The exponential growth of digital health data in hospitals has intensified concerns about data breaches, privacy violations, and interoperability failures within healthcare information systems. Traditional centralized data architectures remain highly vulnerable to cyberattacks, unauthorized access, and single points of failure, threatening the integrity of sensitive patient records. As healthcare systems transition toward smart and interconnected digital ecosystems, there is a pressing need for robust, transparent, and tamper-resistant data management frameworks. This study systematically reviews existing literature on the application of blockchain technology as a secure solution for health data management in smart hospitals. Adopting the PRISMA 2020 protocol, publications from 2016 to 2025 were retrieved from major databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed. Out of 436 relevant studies, 42 peer-reviewed studies met the inclusion criteria. Data extraction captured study characteristics, blockchain types, implementation contexts, and findings. Evidence synthesis followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-step thematic analysis framework. Findings reveal that blockchain enhances data security and integrity through cryptographic immutability and distributed consensus mechanisms, mitigates privacy risks via smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs, and improves interoperability across healthcare stakeholders. However, challenges persist in scalability, regulatory alignment, and implementation costs, particularly in low-resource settings. This study concludes that hybrid and permissioned blockchain models offer the most viable pathway for achieving secure, compliant, and efficient healthcare data ecosystems. Therefore, this study recommends further integration with artificial intelligence and cloud technologies to optimize performance, while aligning deployment with ethical, legal, and institutional frameworks governing digital health.
Abstract With the growing implementation of multi sensor Internet of Things (IoT) and edge AI systems, the concerns over data reliability,privacy, and verifiability have been intensified. Conventional fusion architectures rely on deep learning models that deliverhigh accuracy. However, they fail to ensure that inferences are provably correct or tamper resistant under missing, noisy, oradversarial data conditions. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Zero-Knowledge Privacy Assured SensorFusion (ZK-PAS Fusion) framework. ZK-PAS Fusion integrates convex bounded imputation, attention driven multi sensorfusion, BiLSTM based temporal modeling, and recursive zero-knowledge proof aggregation within a unified architecture. Theframework assures correctness, privacy, and robustness through cryptographic commitments and circuit level verifiability.Experimental evaluation is performed on two large scale clinical datasets, namely, MIMIC-IV and eICU-CDR. The modeldemonstrates a superior performance and achieves 99.45 % accuracy, 99.57 % F1-score, and an AUROC of 0.989, surpassingstate of the art transformer and diffusion based baselines by up to 5.4 % in accuracy and 6.2 % in F1-score. The proof moduleattains a 40 ms average proving time, 0.4 KB proof size, and ≈ 46 % lower energy consumption compared to state of the art(SOTA) models. These results establish ZK-PAS Fusion as a verifiable, memory efficient, and privacy preserving AI frameworkfor real time, safety critical edge IoT deployments.
This deliverable presents the design and functional validation of a Blockchain Toolkit that supports decentralised identity, privacy-preserving verification, and trust management mechanisms tailored for emerging 6G ecosystems. The toolkit addresses fundamental limitations of centralised trust infrastructures by replacing hierarchical identity and communication models with ledger-anchored, self-sovereign, and cryptographically verifiable components suitable for large-scale, heterogeneous environments.At its core, the toolkit provides a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) architecture based on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), and Anonymous Credentials (ACs), following W3C standards. This identity layer enables secure authentication, selective disclosure, and privacy-preserving verification without dependence on central authorities. Secure messaging and data exchange are supported through DIDComm-based communication patterns and encrypted, DID-bound storage, enabling trusted interactions across administrative and organisational boundaries.The deliverable further consolidates a set of cryptographic building blocks relevant to privacy and trust in 6G systems. These include zero-knowledge proof–based verification patterns, anonymous credential workflows, and privacy-enhancing mechanisms designed to reduce metadata leakage while preserving auditability. Together, these components enable verifiable compliance and trustworthy coordination in adversarial or untrusted environments.To demonstrate applicability, the Blockchain Toolkit is mapped to representative 6G-aligned use cases. These include specialised consensus mechanisms for dynamic spectrum environments, AI-assisted trust management to address data quality and integrity challenges, and NFT-based resource management for network slicing and dynamic spectrum sharing. In these scenarios, blockchain-based tokens and credentials act as programmable trust anchors, while the toolkit’s identity and cryptographic layers enhance privacy, accountability, and resilience against misuse and collusion.Overall, Deliverable 2.4 provides a coherent and standards-aligned toolkit for decentralised trust in 6G ecosystems. By integrating decentralised identity, privacy-preserving cryptographic verification, secure communication, and application-driven blockchain mechanisms, the toolkit supports scalable, privacy-aware, and verifiable interactions among diverse 6G stakeholders, contributing toward trustworthy next-generation wireless infrastructures.
This deliverable (D4.4 – Federated AI/ML) defines the architecture, requirements, and enabling technologies for secure and privacy-preserving federated learning within the CONFIDENTIAL6G project. The document specifies how federated AI/ML can be safely deployed across heterogeneous 6G cloud–edge environments, allowing collaborative model training while ensuring that sensitive data remains local and protected throughout the learning lifecycle. The deliverable consolidates background and state-of-the-art insights on federated learning in 6G, identifies key security, privacy, and trust challenges, and derives a set of functional, security, governance, and operational requirements that guide system design. It then presents the overall federated AI/ML architecture developed under this task, which brings together confidential orchestration, federated learning coordination, cryptographic trust mechanisms, and secure execution across cloud-edge environments. The architecture builds on the confidential orchestration foundations established in Deliverable 4.3 and integrates key enablers from WP2—such as Decentralized Identifiers, Verifiable Credentials, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs—to support verifiable, policy-driven, and privacy-preserving participation throughout the federated learning lifecycle. Within this architecture, blockchain-enabled aggregation is introduced as a complementary mechanism to strengthen integrity, auditability, and decentralized trust in model management and aggregation workflows by removing single points of failure and providing tamper-evident provenance for AI/ML models. In parallel, the deliverable reports algorithmic contributions that enhance robustness and fairness under non-IID data distributions and device heterogeneity, ensuring that the proposed architecture remains effective under realistic deployment conditions. Finally, the document outlines how the Federated AI/ML integrates with WP5 use cases, demonstrating its relevance for real-world validation scenarios. Overall, this deliverable establishes a coherent and secure federated learning foundation that supports CONFIDENTIAL6G’s objectives for trustworthy, privacy-preserving AI in next-generation 6G environments.
Abhinav Raghav, Aanjey Mani Tripathi, Niyaz Ahmad Wani, Naveed Ahmad · 6 authors
Data transactions in healthcare are steadily increasing across various platforms, aiming to improve patient care and increase data transparency. Blockchain technology will serve as a catalyst in healthcare data transactions, ensuring data security and privacy for various stakeholders. Improving data security, transparency, and interoperability, blockchain technology's application in healthcare has demonstrated considerable promise. However, healthcare applications that rely on real-time data transaction settlement face obstacles caused by Layer1 blockchains' poor transaction throughput and excessive latency. In this work, we adopt established consensus and a zk-Rollup verification workflow, specifying healthcare-oriented configurations for security, auditability, and throughput. This paper integrates the smart contracts, zero knowledge proof and off chain data storage to increase the efficiency, and security and reduce transaction costs. The usefulness of the suggested algorithm in healthcare applications is demonstrated by thorough literature research, comparative analysis, and experimental data. Transaction throughput increases very high, latency improved by 57%, and decrease the transaction cost to 96% in healthcare data transactions which are all greatly improved by the proposed system. Unlike existing zk-Rollup-based healthcare frameworks, the proposed model integrates cross-chain identity validation and verifiable data provenance to achieve secure interoperability across multi-chain healthcare systems.
Aditya Rathore, Kratika Mishra, Vidhi Chandrayan, Pareek Ch. S.
Blockchain technology has evolved into one of the most influential digital innovations of the 21st century, enabling decentralized, trustless, and tamper‑resistant data management across global networks. Its rapid rise can be attributed to groundbreaking applications across cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), healthcare, supply chain, and identity management systems. Despite this explosive growth, blockchain technology still faces major challenges—most critically, scalability. This extended study explores blockchain’s historical development, factors driving adoption, technical architecture, and the limitations restricting mass deployment. The paper includes an in‑depth analysis of publicly available blockchain datasets that support research in security, analytics, and scalability modeling. Furthermore, the study reviews emerging scalability frameworks such as sharding, off‑chain computation, Layer‑2 rollups, DAG-based systems, and consensus optimization. The goal is to provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding blockchain’s evolution while outlining future paths toward global-scale adoption.
The integration of IoT technology in smart grids has revolutionized the energy sector by enabling decentralized energy production, real-time monitoring, and peer-to-peer energy trading. However, these advancements introduce challenges such as ensuring security, scalability, and data privacy, which are critical for the reliable operation of IoT-enabled smart grids. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges by providing decentralized, secure, and transparent frameworks for managing energy transactions. This study aims to explore the application of blockchain in enhancing the security and scalability of IoT-enabled smart grids while addressing challenges related to resource limitations and privacy concerns. Simulation and experimental analyses were employed to evaluate blockchain performance in a decentralized energy network. The study focused on key metrics: latency, transaction throughput, energy consumption, and data integrity. The study shows Proof of Authority (PoA) excels in IoT smart grids with < 200 ms latency, 190 Tx/s throughput, and 0.5–0.9 J/Tx energy use—outperforming PoW (450-780 ms, 5.2–10.3 J/Tx). While Proof of Stake (PoS) offers competitive 0.3–0.7 J/Tx efficiency and higher 210 Tx/s scalability, its latency (150–300 ms) remains slightly higher than PoA. These results position PoA as ideal for resource-constrained IoT nodes, while PoS better suits more extensive networks needing higher throughput. The findings highlight how consensus mechanisms can be tailored to different smart grid requirements, with PoA providing the best balance for most decentralized energy applications. Additionally, blockchain's immutable ledger ensured zero unauthorized data modifications, enhancing data security and transparency. The practical implementation of these results highlights blockchain's potential to transform IoT-enabled smart grids. By reducing security vulnerabilities and operational inefficiencies, blockchain enables secure and efficient peer-to-peer energy trading and enhances the resilience of decentralized energy systems. Future work should optimize scalability beyond 500 nodes and integrate advanced privacy-preserving mechanisms to ensure the widespread adoption of blockchain in innovative grid applications.
IoT data demands are growing, with Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) offering secure data management, provided they can meet scaling and efficiency requirements that are more restrictive than in conventional application environments. This article comprehensively surveys 27 DLTs of varying paradigms and implementation methods, proposes a scoring method for determining DLT-IoT integration suitability, and then applies that method to the surveyed DLTs. Six DLTs were shortlisted as the most promising, which were then subjected to in-depth analysis around three IoT use cases: health-IoT, e-commerce and automotive manufacturing. We discuss the viability of lightweight DLTs and identify crucial future research directions.
The rapid integration of IoT with edge computing has revolutionized various domains, particularly healthcare, by enabling real-time data sharing, remote monitoring, and decision-making. However, it introduces critical challenges, including data privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, especially in environments dealing with sensitive information. Traditional access control mechanisms and centralized security systems do not address these issues, leaving IoT environments exposed to unauthorized access and data misuse. This research proposes Fuzzychain-edge, a novel Fuzzy logic-based adaptive Access control model for Blockchain in Edge Computing framework designed to overcome these limitations by incorporating Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), fuzzy logic, and smart contracts. ZKPs secure sensitive data during access control processes by enabling verification without revealing confidential details, thereby ensuring user privacy. Fuzzy logic facilitates adaptive, context-aware decision-making for access control by dynamically evaluating parameters such as data sensitivity, trust levels, and user roles. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable architecture, ensures transparency, traceability, and accountability using smart contracts that automate access control processes. The proposed framework addresses key challenges by enhancing security, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access, and providing a transparent audit trail of data transactions. Expected outcomes include improved data privacy, accuracy in access control, and increased user trust in IoT systems. This research contributes significantly to advancing privacy-preserving, secure, and traceable solutions in IoT environments, laying the groundwork for future innovations in decentralized technologies and their applications in critical domains such as healthcare and beyond.
The rapid advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the creation of large-scale interconnected networks of smart devices capable of autonomously collecting, processing, and exchanging data in real time across diverse application domains. While this development offers significant benefits, it also introduces critical challenges related to data security, privacy protection, interoperability, and the increasingly complex governance of distributed IoT systems. Traditional centralized governance approaches often fail to address these issues effectively due to single points of failure, limited transparency, and insufficient trust mechanisms. The integration of blockchain technology into IoT ecosystems provides a promising alternative by leveraging decentralized architecture, immutable ledgers, transparency, and tamper-resistant features that enhance accountability and trust. This study aims to identify and design an appropriate governance model for blockchain-integrated IoT systems that balances security, operational efficiency, and decentralization. The research adopts a conceptual and qualitative approach through a systematic literature analysis and the synthesis of existing governance, blockchain, and IoT frameworks to develop a structured governance model. The proposed framework defines institutional roles, policy structures, decision-making processes, and control mechanisms among participating entities. The results demonstrate that a blockchain-based governance model enhances system security, operational efficiency, and inter-organizational trust by reducing reliance on centralized authorities and improving data integrity. In addition, the use of smart contracts enables automated policy enforcement, transparent coordination, and sustainable system operations, supporting scalable and resilient governance for future blockchain IoT ecosystems.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enables real-time health monitoring and intelligent clinical decision-making by continuously collecting and processing sensitive physiological data from wearable, implantable, and edge-connected devices. However, this data aggregation paradigm introduces critical privacy and security challenges, including data leakage, aggregator misbehavior, and adversarial attacks, while existing frameworks often fail to simultaneously ensure confidentiality, verifiability, and efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose MedGuard, a novel end-to-end secure data aggregation framework for IoMT that synergistically integrates Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) based on the CKKS scheme and Groth16 zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). MedGuard enables healthcare providers to perform complex analytical queries, such as statistical analysis, anomaly detection, and trend forecasting, directly on encrypted data without decryption, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. By allowing edge nodes to generate cryptographic proofs of correct computation and enabling cloud-based verification, MedGuard eliminates reliance on trusted intermediaries and mitigates insider threats. Our comprehensive evaluation, conducted in a high-fidelity OMNeT++ 6.0.1 simulation environment with 1,000 IoMT devices, 100 edge nodes, and an Amazon EC2 c5.4xlarge cloud server, uses a hybrid dataset combining real-world and GMM-augmented synthetic data. Results show that MedGuard achieves an end-to-end latency of 64.8 ms, a 13.3% improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, communication efficiency of 1.465 GB/s, per-query energy consumption of 1.489 mJ, and sustained throughputs of 1,200 packets/s, 120 aggregates/s, and 1,200 queries/s. These performance gains, combined with a robust [Formula: see text] security level, demonstrate that MedGuard delivers scalable, verifiable, and privacy-preserving analytics for next-generation smart healthcare systems.
Abstract The relentless growth of connected devices is transforming industrial, urban and domestic environments, yet it also expands the attack surface for distributed denial of service (DDoS), unauthorized access and data manipulation. Centralized security architectures struggle to cope with the scale and heterogeneity of the Internet of Things, creating single points of failure and privacy risks. This review takes a close look at how blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) can work together to solve these problems. Blockchain plays an important role in decentralizing trust, maintaining data integrity, and enabling transparent audit trails. AI subfields such as machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), reinforcement learning (RL), and multi-agent systems (MAS) enhance these benefits. They enable real-time anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and adaptive policy control. A seven axis Blockchain–AI Security Integration Schema (BASIS) is proposed to classify solutions by security objectives, intelligence modalities, trust primitives, deployment choices, scalability techniques, privacy controls and interoperability mechanisms. In this study also review Layer-2 consensus protocols, federated learning and lightweight deep learning models that address energy and computational constraints. Case studies from supply chains, healthcare and smart grids illustrate the benefits and limitations of current deployments. The evidence suggests that while AI improves the accuracy and responsiveness of threat detection, blockchain offers tamper-proof data provenance. However, there are still issues in achieving scalability, reducing computational overhead, and striking a balance between auditability and privacy. Hybrid on-chain/off-chain architectures, quantum-safe cryptography, and standardized frameworks to guarantee adoption and interoperability are some future research avenues.
Michael G. Xevgenis, Maria Polychronaki, Dimitrios G. Kogias, Helen C. Leligkou · 5 authors
Zero-Touch Network (ZTN) represents a cornerstone approach of Next Generation Networks (NGNs), enabling fully automated and AI-driven network and service management. However, their distributed and multi-domain nature introduces critical security challenges, particularly regarding service identity and data integrity. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based framework to enhance the security of ZTN through two complementary mechanisms: decentralized digital identity management and oracle-assisted network monitoring. First, a Decentralized Identity Management framework aligned with Zero-Trust Architecture principles is introduced to ensure tamper-proof authentication and authorization in a trustless environment among network components. By leveraging decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and zero-knowledge proofs, the proposed Decentralized Authentication and Authorization component eliminates reliance on centralized authorities, while preserving privacy and interoperability across domains. Second, the paper investigates blockchain oracle mechanisms as a means to extend data integrity guarantees beyond the blockchain, enabling secure monitoring of Network Services and validation of Service-Level Agreements. We propose a four-dimensional framework for oracle design, based on qualitative comparison of oracle types—decentralized, compute-enabled, and consensus-based—to identify their suitability for NGN scenarios. This work proposes an architectural and design framework for Zero-Touch Networks, focusing on system integration and security-aware orchestration rather than large-scale experimental evaluation. The outcome of our study highlights the potential of integrating blockchain-based identity and oracle solutions to achieve resilient, transparent, and self-managed network ecosystems. This research bridges the gap between theory and implementation by offering a holistic approach that unifies identity security and data integrity in ZTNs, paving the way towards trustworthy and autonomous 6G infrastructures.
Chandramohan Dhasarathan, Puviyarasi Thirugnanasammandamoorthi, B. Ramachandra Reddy, Diwakar Tripathi
The integration of Blockchain technology with the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) presents transformative potential for healthcare, enhancing data security, privacy, and transparency. As IoMT devices collect and transmit sensitive health data, ensuring privacy and preventing unauthorized access become critical concerns. Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable ledger that can address these challenges by providing secure transaction recording and audit trails. However, limitations related to scalability and efficiency remain obstacles to broad adoption. This research explores various optimization strategies such as consensus algorithm improvements (e.g., Proof of Stake over Proof of Work), hybrid Blockchain models, and off-chain storage to enhance performance in IoMT environments. Lightweight cryptographic protocols are also proposed to reduce device overhead. Through simulations and real-world case studies, we evaluate these strategies in terms of latency, energy efficiency, security, and compliance. Results indicate that Blockchain, when optimized, significantly enhances trust, interoperability, and usability in healthcare IoMT applications.