Aug 2026· Discover Internet of Things· Vol 6· 0 citations· 35 references
TL;DR
This work demonstrates that a dynamic, reputation-based security layer can provide near-total protection against the modeled threats at negligible performance cost, offering a viable, highly effective solution for securing resource-constrained IoT deployments.
Abstract
The integration of blockchain technology into Internet of Things (IoT) environments presents a fundamental conflict between the demand for robust, decentralized security and the severe computational constraints of IoT devices. While Proof-of-Authority (PoA) has emerged as an efficient consensus mechanism for permissioned networks, its inherent security model remains vulnerable to valid transactions from compromised or malicious nodes, a critical gap in existing protocols. This paper introduces PoA-TG Chain, a novel framework that enhances PoA with an integrated, lightweight Trust-Gating (PoA-TG) mechanism. This system assigns a dynamic, behavior-based trust score to each node, using it as a rapid pre-filter to reject transactions from untrusted actors before they enter the consensus process. Through a comprehensive simulation study, we conducted a rigorous comparative analysis of a standard PoA model against our proposed PoA-TG framework. The findings are definitive: the PoA-TG Chain framework reduced the success rate of malicious transactions from 25.35% in the standard PoA model to a mere 0.28%. This constitutes a 98.9% reduction in the remaining vulnerability, demonstrating the profound effectiveness of the trust-gating mechanism. This critical security hardening is achieved with remarkable efficiency, incurring only a 7.2% reduction in network throughput and a marginal 0.02% increase in average CPU load per transaction. Our work demonstrates that a dynamic, reputation-based security layer can provide near-total protection against the modeled threats at negligible performance cost, offering a viable, highly effective solution for securing resource-constrained IoT deployments.
Elastic Proof-of-Location Byzantine Fault Tolerance is proposed, a privacy-preserving and location-aware blockchain consensus framework for IoT systems that reduces communication overhead and improves consensus efficiency compared with conventional PBFT-based approaches while strengthening resilience against location-based and identity-based attacks.
Yunus Kareem, D. Djenouri, Essam Ghadafi· Future Internet· 0 citations
The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has placed considerable pressure on both security and stability in heterogeneous, resource-constrained networks. In such dynamic environments, trust management is a central issue to determine which service providers can be trusted and to combat malicious activity. Although blockchain-based solutions have offered a means for decentralized, tamper-resistant trust management, most rely on classical cryptographic primitives, which are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. This study proposes a Quantum-Resistant Blockchain-Based Trust Management (QR-BCTM) framework in which Post-Quantum Cryptographic mechanisms, Permissioned Blockchain Platform, and Fog-assisted Trust Management architecture are combined and utilized in IoT networks. The framework introduces a quantum-aware trust computation model that combines behavioral trust, indirect recommendations, and a cryptographic assurance score quantifying each participant’s compliance with security requirements. Trust evidence is compressed to reduce blockchain storage and communication overhead, while the hierarchical fog-blockchain architecture offloads computationally intensive operations from resource-constrained IoT devices. The performance of the framework has been simulated in the presence of an adversary, including bad-mouthing, ballot-stuffing, on-off behavior, and identity attacks using a Sybil-type mechanism. Trust accuracy, false trust acceptance, communication overhead, and computation cost were measured, and a sensitivity analysis on the trust-weight parameters was performed. The simulation results suggest that QR-BCTM can enhance the accuracy of trust evaluation, mitigate the impact of malicious nodes, and remain scalable and efficient despite the existing cryptographic overhead. Post-quantum digital signatures and formal security analysis provide protection against quantum-era threats and attacks, while classical threats are mitigated through behavioral trust aggregation and recommendation filtering. In summary, QR-BCTM provides a scalable, simulation-validated and quantum-aware framework for trustworthy IoT network operation, offering practical guidelines for future deployment and prototyping.
M. A. Al-Khasawneh, D. Alsekait, K. Alkayid et al.· Scientific Reports· 0 citations
As IoT deployments rapidly expand, ensuring comprehensive end-to-end security across identity, authorization, communication, integrity, and auditability is critical. This paper presents BISF-IoT, a Blockchain-Integrated Security Framework that utilizes a permissioned ledger as a tamper-evident control plane while keeping high-volume telemetry and raw logs off-chain. BISF-IoT integrates decentralized identity (DID) management, capability-based authorization with explicit revocation under a freshness bound Δ, and secure-channel identity binding for MQTT/CoAP edge devices. Formal game-based proofs establish five core security properties: DID authenticity, authorization soundness, revocation safety, tamper-evident logging, and auditable anomaly alert non-repudiation. Performance evaluation through simulation with up to 10,000 devices demonstrates near-linear scalability, processing up to 160,000 transactions per day with a scaling efficiency of ~0.90–1.00. Authorization latency increases moderately from 120 ms at 100 devices to 650 ms at 10,000 devices. Therefore, it remains within practical operational limits. Blockchain storage grows steadily at approximately 37–42 MB/day by storing compact Merkle commitments and security artifacts while avoiding raw data bloat. Meanwhile Log verification time exhibits sub-linear growth, with verification cost per entry decreasing from 0.200 ms to 0.055 ms as log size increases from 100 to 10,000 entries, reflecting efficient Merkle inclusion proof mechanisms. These results confirm BISF-IoT’s capability to provide scalable, secure, and verifiable control-plane operations suitable for large-scale IoT environments.
Shahid Imran, Kalsoom Safdar, Muhammad Usman Younus· International Journal of Inn...· 0 citations
New computing environments such as the cloud, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT) introduce new challenges in trust management, security, and energy efficiency. Centralized trust management systems focus on a single point of failure, making them less transparent and more vulnerable to attack. This paper presents the first trust framework based on blockchain technology to support security and sustainability in distributed computing systems. The methodology presented in this paper combines distributed ledger technology, smart contracts, and a lightweight consensus mechanism to provide a transparent and computationally inexpensive way to trust evaluation. To evaluate trust dynamically at a given node, a multi-factor trust model is used that incorporates trust, security, behavioral factors, and energy efficiency. A distributed system with 100 nodes and 1000 transactions per node was used to evaluate the framework experimentally. Results indicated that the proposed system attained a trust score of 95%, and performed better than centralized (82%) and reputation-based (88%) models. The system also improved energy efficiency by 26.7% relative to baseline systems, indicating that the computing system can be integrated to enhance sustainability. The blockchain framework trust models provided security and energy savings in distributed systems. It also presented robust designs and useful computational environments. Future extensions of this work will focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) based trust prediction and on determining hybrid blockchains for performance improvements.
Priyanka Singh, Sonam Dubey· 2026 4th International Confe...· 0 citations
Smart cities increasingly depend on large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures for traffic management, smart grids, and environmental monitoring. Ensuring data integrity, transparency, and privacy in such systems remains a major challenge because centralized platforms are vulnerable to manipulation, while conventional blockchain-based solutions suffer from scalability and confidentiality limitations. This study proposes TrustIoT-Chain, a privacy-preserving blockchain framework that integrates off-chain digital twins, cryptographic data commitments, zero-knowledge compliance verification, and a sharded blockchain architecture for scalable smart city monitoring. The objective of this work is to provide real-time verifiable IoT monitoring with strong privacy guarantees and high system throughput. Large-scale simulations with one million synthetic IoT events demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves up to 24,910 events/s throughput with an average verification latency of 410 ms using 16 shards. Energy consumption is reduced by approximately 45% compared with non-sharded blockchain systems with zeroknowledge proofs, while privacy leakage measured by mutual information decreases to 0.05 bits. The key novelty lies in the joint integration of the digital twins with the blockchain-based zero-knowledge auditing, and sharding for the smart city IoT systems. This approach enables transparent regulatory compliance verification without exposing the raw sensor data, offering the scalable, and privacy-aware foundation for the future smart city governance, and trusted IoT ecosystems.
Shrutika Khobragade, J. Bakal· 2026 7th International Confe...· 0 citations
The introduction of blockchain technology has revolutionized decentralized systems. Blockchain enables peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions to be trustworthy and transparent. However, existing traditional consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) have significant issues regarding computational costs, efficiency, and centralization, which severely limit their adoption in resource-constrained environments. For instance, in an industrial Internet of Things (IoT) network or a smart metering infrastructure, devices operate on strict energy budgets and cannot participate in compute-heavy PoW mining. They also lack the capital to lock up financial stakes for PoS. To address those limitations, randomized consensus mechanisms such as Pure Proof of Stake (PPoS) and Proof of Luck (PoL) were introduced. Yet these methods have issues with fairness, secure randomness generation, and cost efficiency. This paper proposes a new randomized proposer selection mechanism for blockchain consensus called Proof of Proximity (PoP) that enhances unpredictability, fairness, decentralization, and security. PoP replaces cryptographic randomness beacons with transaction-derived entropy and distance minimization. This enables fair, unpredictable proposer selection without relying on Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs), trusted hardware, or stakebased weighting, maintaining low computational overhead. The mechanism is ideal for IoT networks where resource consumption and security are critical. Experimental and comparative analysis results prove that PoP achieves improved fairness, decentralization, security, and low resource consumption, making it suitable for resource-constrained decentralized systems.
Nelum Ranawaka, L.A.M.S. Gawesh, G.O. Sundarasekara et al.· Annual International Compute...· 0 citations