2026· International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications· 0 citations· 30 references
TL;DR
The proposed framework outperforms existing blockchain-based models, achieving a 37.7% reduction in encryption/decryption time, a 51.3% decrease in transaction latency, and a 54.5% improvement in energy efficiency, and confirms that the proposed approach provides a practical balance between security assurance and performance optimization.
Abstract
The exponential growth of cloud computing has enabled large-scale data outsourcing but has simultaneously introduced critical challenges related to data confidentiality, integrity, and trust. Traditional cryptographic and blockchain-based cloud security solutions often suffer from high computational overhead, latency, and scalability limitations, which hinder their practical adoption. To address these issues, this study proposes a robust and lightweight blockchain-based security framework for secure cloud data storage. The framework integrates hybrid AES–ECC encryption, smart contract–driven access control, and a lightweight consensus mechanism combining Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) to achieve efficient and tamper-resistant data management. The proposed system employs an on-chain/off-chain hybrid architecture that stores only essential metadata and cryptographic proofs on the blockchain while maintaining the actual data in distributed cloud storage. This design minimizes computational burden and blockchain bloat while ensuring end-to-end transparency and verifiability. A Merkle tree–based Proof of Storage (PoS) mechanism enables rapid integrity verification without requiring full data retrieval. Comprehensive experiments were conducted using a simulated multi-node cloud environment to evaluate encryption efficiency, transaction latency, throughput, storage overhead, and energy consumption. Results show that the proposed framework outperforms existing blockchain-based models, achieving a 37.7% reduction in encryption/decryption time, a 51.3% decrease in transaction latency, and a 54.5% improvement in energy efficiency. Additionally, the system attained a 99.3% security success rate under various attack scenarios, demonstrating its resilience against unauthorized access, replay, and tampering attempts. These findings confirm that the proposed approach provides a practical balance between security assurance and performance optimization.
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced significant security challenges, mainly due to the resource constraints of devices and the limitations of centralized architectures. This paper proposes a blockchain-based Zero-Trust framework for secure and scalable IoT systems. The approach is architecture-agnostic and combines decentralized identity management, hybrid data storage, and edge-assisted computation. To optimize resource usage, raw data are stored off-chain while cryptographic hashes are anchored on the blockchain, ensuring integrity and immutability. A Merkle tree structure is employed to aggregate data efficiently, reducing communication overhead and blockchain transaction costs. Experimental results demonstrate that lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, combined with Merkle-based aggregation, provide strong security guarantees with low energy consumption. The proposed framework achieves improved scalability, robustness, and efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained IoT environments.
Florian Bonelli, Alexandre dos Santos Roque, E. P. de Freitas· International Conference on...· 0 citations
The exponential emergence of cross-chain data sharing in blockchain-enabled IoT and cloud systems creates vital challenges in the scalability, privacy, and post-quantum security landscapes. To tackle these problems, we propose a hierarchical attribute clustering-attribute-based encryption (HAC-ABE) scheme in this paper, which offers a secure post-quantum cross-blockchain data exchange framework. The method utilizes hierarchical attribute clustering and lattice-based encryption to reduce the computation overhead while supporting fine-grained access control. It utilizes IPFS decentralized storage and smart contracts to achieve a transparent data exchange across chains. Experimental results show 9.7% faster computation time and much lower communication overheads than state-of-the-art ABE-based approaches, verifying its effectiveness and scalability for practical decentralized environments.
Sunil Parihar, Jigyasu Dubey· Journal of Intelligent Decis...· 0 citations
Cloud computing has become the backbone of modern distributed data management, offering scalable storage and on-demand analytics to healthcare, financial, educational, and government organizations. However, two security requirements are frequently addressed in isolation in the literature: preserving the privacy of sensitive attributes during analytical processing, and guaranteeing that outsourced data remains unmodified and verifiable while it resides with an untrusted cloud service provider. This paper analyzes two complementary cloud-security paradigms adaptive differential privacy for perturbation-based confidentiality and blockchain-assisted third-party auditing for tamper-evident integrity verification and proposes a unified Blockchain-Assisted Adaptive Differential Privacy (BA-ADP) framework that integrates both into a single secure cloud data-management pipeline. The proposed framework performs sensitivity-aware adaptive noise generation to protect data confidentiality during analytics, applies lightweight encryption and access control during storage and transmission, and simultaneously anchors SHA-256 integrity hashes of every data block on a blockchain ledger that is verified through smart-contract-automated third-party auditing. This dual-layer design allows a cloud system to resist inference, linkage, and reconstruction attacks on the privacy side while resisting tampering, single-point-of-failure, and collusion risks on the integrity side, without requiring two independent security subsystems. Drawing on previously reported component-level results 96.1% privacy-protection efficiency with 3.8% leakage probability for the adaptive differential-privacy layer, and 97.4% integrity-verification accuracy with a 96.8% tampering-detection rate for the blockchain-assisted auditing layer this paper presents an architectural synthesis, a security analysis, and a discussion of the expected computational trade-offs of combining both mechanisms. The findings indicate that unifying adaptive privacy preservation with decentralized integrity auditing yields a more complete cloud-security posture than either mechanism alone, and the paper outlines the empirical validation, including full-scale testbed experiments, required before deployment.
Jayakumar D, M. Ramamoorthy· International journal of com...· 0 citations
By using PUF-generated responses as hardware-rooted seeds for mining and authentication, the framework removes the need for permanent secret storage and establishes a secure chain from device identity to consensus participation, making it suitable for practical deployment in industrial IoT, smart infrastructure, and other resource-constrained distributed systems.
B. Narayanapuram, J. Panda· IEEE Access· 0 citations
This paper introduces Data Communities as a novel paradigm for privacy-preserving, blockchain-enabled cooperative digital infrastructures, formalized within the Cooperative Digital Infrastructure (CDI) framework and formalizes privacy guarantees through an adversarial model encompassing classical, quantum, insider, and governance-level threats.
Preservation and secure treatment of digital evidence across different courts of justice are serious issues due to trust, information leakage, scalability and dynamism. Existing centralised and blockchain-based evidence databases are vulnerable to single points of failure, are privacy-unfriendly, or have significant performance gaps at scale. To overcome these defects, this paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy-preserving and scalable electronic evidence management system for the judicial alliance environments. The proposed system will be constructed based on a consortium blockchain architecture, with HotStuffle Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol, Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) based access authorization, and a more operational Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) architecture. It is an on-chain/off-chain storage structure where cryptographic hash values, metadata, and access logs are stored on-chain to provide integrity, auditability, and non-repudiation. Conversely, encrypted electronic evidence files are not kept on blockchains to reduce storage overheads. ZKP supports privacy-sensitive authentication without disclosing valuable identity or role information, and the improved CP-ABE protocol supports finely grained, revocable access control by storing access policies in ciphertext. This has been supported by extensive testing through large-scale experimentation to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed framework. Scalability: The results show that end-to-end access latency increases by 240-910 ms as the number of validator nodes increases, confirming HotStuffle's consensus' scalability advantage. The system's throughput is almost linearly related to the rate of transaction arrivals, reaching a peak of 390 transactions/second, after which it starts levelling off. The overhead of ZKP during verification is low, and verification time increases by 36 ms and 8 ms for proofs of 10 KB and 80 KB, respectively. In addition, the time required to decrypt CP-ABE increases gradually with the number of access attributes, ranging from 5 to 285 ms. Conversely, even when 40 per cent of users are revoked, the revocation processing time remains reasonable. Security and comparative analysis demonstrate that the described framework can provide better privacy protection and fine-grained access control, resist collusion and replay attacks, and is more advantageous than existing blockchain-based models of electronic evidence sharing. Overall, the proposed system offers adequate scalability, privacy, and security; thus, it can be used for large-scale deployment of judicial alliances.
Fadhil Kadhem Zaidan, Nuha Salim Mohammed, Ibtesam Jomaa Hawi et al.· Al-Noor Journal of Engineeri...· 0 citations