Privacy-Enhancing Distributed Ledger Design for Resilient Internet of Things Networks

Abstract

The ubiquitous use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices across the critical infrastructures has brought about serious privacy risks, centralizing the risk of failure, and lack of resilience to the traditional data management architecture. Conventional distributed ledger system, although it provides the attributes of immutability and decentralization, does not in most cases include inherent privacy safeguards and adaptive resilience system, leading to data leakage, unauthorized surveillance and single points of compromise. To overcome these obstacles, this paper will present a Privacy-Enhancing Distributed Ledger Design of Resilient Internet of Things Networks (PEDL-RIoT), a new architecture that will combine zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized identity management and fault-tolerant consensus protocols into a single privacy-resilience framework. The design proposed would provide confidential transaction validation, anonymous device authentication as well as ledger integrity without losing operational continuity due to a cyber-physical attack or network partitions. The model changes the vulnerable IoT infrastructures into the trustworthy, privacy-conscious, and resilient ecosystems. Experimental validation shows that data confidentiality, network survivability, attack resistance, and transaction throughput are significantly better with experimental blockchain-IoT models as compared to baseline blockchain-IoT models. The framework can be applied in the smart grids, healthcare monitoring, autonomous logistics, and defense IoT networks. In the long run, PEDL-RIoT will provide a safe and strong base towards next-generation decentralized IoT governance.