DTLS-Trust: A Blockchain-Enhanced Security Framework with AI Based Trust Scoring for UDP Communications

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is widely used in low-latency applications such as IoT, real-time systems, and streaming services due to its connectionless nature and minimal overhead. However, its stateless design introduces significant security vulnerabilities that traditional mechanisms like Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) fail to address comprehensively. This paper presents a novel security framework that enhances UDP’s security through three key innovations: (1) a blockchain-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for immutable certificate verification, (2) a dynamic trust scoring mechanism for continuous behavioral analysis, and (3) an extended UDP header structure that integrates cryptographic trust metrics without compromising backward compatibility. Our implementation demonstrates robust security guarantees, validated through formal verification using ProVerif. The results show that our framework effectively mitigates UDP’s inherent vulnerabilities while maintaining its efficiency, making it suitable for modern network environments. This work bridges the gap between UDP’s advantages and the need for robust security in connectionless communication protocols.