Blockchain-Enhanced Cloud Security: A Scalable Framework with Privacy and Transparency

Cloud computing that is used for data management has proliferated and changed data management, but brings with it serious security challenges such as data breach, unauthorized access, and insider threat. The distributed and dynamic nature of modern cloud environment makes it difficult for centralized cloud security frameworks to address the issue, requiring innovations. Yet, blockchain technology, in its decentralized, immutable, and cryptographically secure ledger applies to fortify the cloud security. Intending to tackle the security problem of chain leveraging, this research advances a hybrid blockchain cloud security framework by proposing smart contracts for automated access control, ZKPs for privacy preserving authentication, and XAI for explanation of the adversarial attack detection. It provides data integrity, puts the access management, and in real time anomaly detection while scalability. Adaptive smart contract policies, ZKP based identity verification and XAI driven insights to foster trust among the stakeholders are the key innovations. Experimental analysis validates that a 20–25% reduction in incident of unauthorized access and a 30% increase in threat detection accuracy are realized, through various attack surfaces, by this new cloud security system in comparison to the traditional cloud security systems. Finally, this work gains significance in advancing secure cloud adoption, which will contribute to global level of cybersecurity resilience and promote the standards for data protection.