Energy-Efficient Smart Contract-based Secure Framework for IoT-enabled Cloud Computing Systems

The combination of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud computing presents some major challenges concerning the security of the transactions processing, computational power, energy consumption, and resources. The current blockchain-based security solutions tend to have constraints related to the complexity of consensus, latency in transactions and storage needs, limiting their use in resource-limited settings. This paper suggests an Energy-Efficient Smart Contract-based Secure Framework (ESC-SF) that comprises of lightweight blockchain consensus, automated access-control policies, and IoT data validation to facilitate secure and resource-efficient cloud execution. The suggested architecture is a Lightweight Proof-of-Authority (LPoA) system, cryptographic authentication, smart-contract-based security enforcement, and using cloud infrastructure to support the verification of transactions and automated security decision-making. To analyze the correlation between initial data filtering and downstream computational needs, an analytical energy-optimization model is created. A five-node Ethereum network, which is privately operated, and a simulated workload of 10,000 IoT transactions are used to evaluate the framework. The given findings imply a mean transaction latency of 2.3 ± 0.4 seconds, along with a 34 and 41 percent decrease in CPU usage and storage expenses respectively relative to the defined proof-of-work benchmark. These results indicate that there may be computational and storage-efficiency benefits, but direct energy measurements and further security verification is needed to determine wider performance benefits. The paper identifies the applicability of lightweight blockchain protocols and automated enforcement of security-policies in computational decision-making in IoT-enabled cloud systems.