A trust-aware replay-resistant dual-chain blockchain protocol with zero-knowledge authentication for secure and scalable IoMT systems

Abstract

The rapid growth of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-based healthcare systems has increased the need for secure and interoperable data exchange across heterogeneous blockchain environments. Existing interoperability solutions often provide limited privacy protection and remain vulnerable to replay attacks, unauthorized access, and data inference threats. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Attack-Resilient Secure Interoperability Protocol (ARSIP), a secure cross-chain protocol for privacy-preserving and replay-resistant communication between heterogeneous blockchain networks. ARSIP integrates four complementary security mechanisms: (i) zero-knowledge proof (ZKP)-based authentication, (ii) ECDH-based key agreement, HKDF session-key derivation, and AEAD (AES-GCM) authenticated encryption for confidentiality and integrity, (iii) nonce–timestamp-based replay protection, and (iv) dual-chain audit anchoring for traceability and auditability. To demonstrate deployment feasibility, ARSIP is implemented within an Ethereum–Hyperledger Fabric architecture supported by a cognitive serverless edge layer for adaptive workload management and low-latency processing. Experimental evaluation using a public IoMT healthcare dataset and a prototype-scale blockchain deployment shows that the ARSIP-enabled framework achieves a 30% reduction in latency, a 43% improvement in attack detection accuracy, and a 35% reduction in energy consumption compared with baseline blockchain-based healthcare systems. Formal verification and experimental analysis further support the protocol’s security properties. The results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of ARSIP for secure cross-chain interoperability and indicate its potential applicability to future IoMT healthcare environments.