Blockchain enabled Intrusion Detection and Prevention System with Immutable Audit Trail

Abstract

The conventional intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) are crippled by the centralized logging structures that are vulnerable to manipulation, single point failures, and lack of forensic auditability with the increasing advanced cyber threats in dynamic network setups. This paper presents blockchain based intrusion detection and prevention system that combines lightweight rule based detection with automated prevention and Proof of Work (PoW) consensus. A combination of threshold-based analysis and regular expression (regex) rules is used to detect potential network attacks by identifying abnormal traffic patterns that indicate malicious activity. Experiments validate 92% detection of simulated attacks, repeat offenses prevention, tamper detection in real-time and a low-minimal mining overhead on standard hardware. Blockchain-IDPS fills the gap between theoretical blockchain-IDPS studies and implementation, providing auditable cybersecurity to IoT, enterprise, and cloud systems and closing crucial gaps in the literature.