A Novel Permissioned Blockchain Approach for Scalable and Privacy-Preserving IoT Authentication

Most existing research on decentralized IoT applications tends to address specific vulnerabilities, with relatively few techniques dedicated to managing privacy and trust issues. To mitigate these challenges, blockchain-based solutions are increasingly adopted to enhance the reliability and security of IoT networks. In particular, blockchain-based authentication frameworks offer a decentralized approach to storing and verifying device identities, enabling secure and trustless communication among devices and with external systems. However, current blockchain-based IoT systems often suffer from complexity and storage overhead. To address these limitations, we propose a novel solution tailored for large-scale IoT environments using a permissioned blockchain. Our approach incorporates optimized data storage and a lightweight authentication mechanism, offering improved scalability and reduced storage demands. Furthermore, we introduce, for the first time, the integration of homomorphic encryption to secure IoT data at the user end before uploading it to the cloud. The proposed framework is evaluated through comprehensive simulations and compared with existing benchmark models. This research contributes a trust-aware security model that significantly enhances both the privacy and security of IoT services.