A secure end-to-end communication framework for cooperative IoT networks using hybrid blockchain system

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive technology that underpins Industry 5.0 by integrating various service technologies to enable intelligent connectivity among smart objects. These technologies enhance the convergence of Information Technology (IT), Operational Technology (OT), Core Technology (CT), and Data Technology (DT) networks, improving automation and decision-making capabilities. While cloud computing has become a mainstream technology across multiple domains, it struggles to efficiently manage the massive volume of OT data generated by IoT devices due to high latency, data transfer costs, limited resilience, and insufficient context awareness. Fog computing has emerged as a viable solution, extending cloud capabilities to the edge through a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) network, enabling decentralized data processing and management. However, IoT networks still face critical challenges, including connectivity, heterogeneity, scalability, interoperability, security, and real-time decision-making constraints. Security is a key challenge in IoT implementations, including secure data communication, IoT edge and fog device identity, end-to-end authentication, and secure storage. This paper presents an efficient blockchain-based framework that creates a secure end-to-end communication cooperative flow IoT network. The framework utilizes a hybrid blockchain network that collaborates to offer a collaborative flow of end-to-end secure communication from end devices to cloud storage. The fog servers will maintain a private blockchain as a next-generation public key infrastructure to identify and authenticate the IoT's edge devices. The consortium blockchain will be maintained in the cloud and integrated with the permission blockchain system. This system ensures secure cloud storage, authorization, efficient key exchange, and remote protection (encryption) of all sensitive information. To improve the synchronization and block generation, reduce overhead, and ensure scalable IoT network operation, we proposed the threshold signature-based Proof of Stake and Validation (PoSV) consensus. Additionally, lightweight authentication protects resource-constrained IoT nodes using an aggregate signature, ensuring security and performance in real-time scenarios. The proposed system is implemented, and its performance is evaluated using key metrics such as cryptographic processing overhead, consensus efficiency, block acceptance time, and transaction delay. The findings show that threshold signature-based Proof of Stake and Validation (PoSV) consensus, reduces the computational burden of individual signature verification, which results in an optimized transaction latency of 80-150 ms, compared to the previous 100-200 ms without Non-PoSV. Additionally, aggregating multiple signatures from different authentication events reduces signing time by 1.98 ms compared to the individual signature time of 2.72 ms and the overhead of verifying multiple individual transactions is 2.87 ms is significantly reduced to1.46 ms along with authentication delay ranges between 95-180 ms. Hence, the proposed framework improves over existing approaches regarding linear computing complexity, increased cryptographic methods, and a more efficient consensus process.