Nelli Yaswanth Kumar, Dr. Singothu Jhansi Rani, Setti Sarika
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices under sixth-generation (6G) networks introduces a highly dynamic, decentralized environment in which static, perimeter-based security models are no longer adequate. This paper proposes AZTM-v3 an adaptive Zero Trust framework that couples behavior-driven trust management with a Random Forest classifier to identify and isolate malicious nodes in real time. The framework is evaluated on an NS-3 simulation of a 150-node 6G IoT network subjected to Sybil, Denial-of-Service (DoS), spoofing, replay and ON-OFF attacks. Unlike prior trust-management proposals that report only qualitative or partial outcomes this work quantifies performance across five dimensions i.e detection accuracy, F1-score, false-positive rate, end-to-end latency and consensus-convergence time and benchmarks AZTM-v3 against PKI-based, centralized-trust and static-blockchain baselines. AZTM-v3 attains a 98.1% overall detection accuracy with a 1.6% false-positive rate at 150 nodes and sustains 95.4% accuracy at 200 nodes outperforming the PKI baseline by 12–18 percentage points across all tested loads. These results indicate that combining tiered trust evaluation with machine learning based classification yields a measurably more scalable and resilient security layer for 6G-enabled IoT deployments than existing static or purely cryptographic approaches.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) security mechanisms often classify isolated messages or assign node-level trust scores, yet these decisions do not explain whether a malicious but authenticated event has distorted the intended evolution of traffic. This paper proposes IntentProv-IoV, a causally grounded provenance framework for traffic-intent preservation in V2X environments. Traffic intent is modeled as the short-horizon collective state expected under non-adversarial conditions, and deviation is measured between predicted and observed traffic states. The framework constructs temporal provenance graphs linking vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), cooperative perception outputs, prediction nodes, and traffic-control decisions. To remove the ambiguity of marginal contribution, node contribution is formalized as an interventional effect in a structural causal model and estimated through Monte Carlo counterfactual edge-weight attenuation, with a linear sensitivity fallback for real-time edge deployment. A calibrated composite score integrates anomaly evidence, traffic-intent deviation, trust risk, and provenance contribution. The evaluation design compares IntentProv-IoV with detection, trust, blockchain trust, graph anomaly, Granger causal, structural causal, and counterfactual GNN baselines and includes predictor sensitivity, adaptive adversaries, prediction noise, packet loss, trajectory-only real-data validation, and edge overhead. Simulation-scale results indicate improved attribution precision, stronger traffic-intent deviation reduction, and edge-suitable latency. By shifting V2X security from message-level detection to causally explainable traffic-intent assurance, IntentProv-IoV provides a more accountable security objective for cooperative vehicular systems.
Smart contract deployment costs constitute an economic consideration in blockchain ecosystems, yet existing gas optimization approaches primarily focus on execution efficiency while neglecting deployment gas reduction. We analyze Solidity storage internals and identify that conventional variable packing–despite reducing storage slots–often increases deployment costs due to compiler-generated masking and shifting operations. This finding motivates State Variable Mutation , the first systematic approach designed to reduce smart contract deployment costs through guided reordering of state variable declarations. Our approach explores variable orderings to identify layouts that minimize gas-expensive storage operations while preserving semantic equivalence and storage efficiency. We implement our approach in DGRed , an open-source tool, and evaluate it on 300 real-world smart contracts. Results demonstrate deployment gas reductions of up to 32.72%, with an average reduction of 15.65% (52,850 gas units per contract), translating to total savings of 15,854,883 gas units across all contracts. Under high network congestion (200 gwei), these savings correspond to $12,381.4. Compared with state-of-the-art gas optimization tools, DGRed achieves superior deployment gas reductions (15.65% average vs. 4.91% for GasSaver and 2.83% for GASOL) while maintaining 100% semantic preservation and producing valid bytecode for all 300 contracts. In contrast, GasSaver introduces compilation errors in 148 contracts, while GASOL generates invalid bytecode in 234. DGRed 's state variable mutation produces identical execution gas to the original contract in all 100 contracts evaluated for execution gas impact, confirming that deployment optimization does not affect runtime efficiency. Additionally, DGRed 's 15.65% reduction is over 8 \(\times\) larger than the best achievable through Solidity compiler flag tuning alone, demonstrating that the two approaches are complementary. DGRed provides developers with a practical, semantic-preserving solution for deployment cost optimization without modifying contract logic or functionality. Because DGRed only reorders state variable declarations, it introduces no runtime trade-off, and entails no risk of behavioral regression.