Blockchain for Industrial IoT Security: A PRISMA-Based Systematic Literature Review
TL;DR
Across the corpus, blockchain is used most often for device authentication, data integrity, access control, traceability, secure data exchange, and distributed trust management.
Abstract
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has expanded the attack surface of modern industrial systems, creating a greater need for tamper-evident, auditable, and low-latency security mechanisms. We reviewed 44 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2019 and 2024. Under the PRISMA 2020 framework, these studies were selected from 26,994 records retrieved from Scopus, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, and the ACM Digital Library. For each included paper, we recorded the industrial context, security objective, role of blockchain, complementary technologies, validation approach, and reported limitations. The studies were subsequently organized into seven primary themes for descriptive synthesis: foundations and reviews; integrity and privacy; architecture and edge integration; 5G/6G convergence; authentication and access control; AI-enabled intelligent security; and trust, traceability, and industrial applications. Across the corpus, blockchain is used most often for device authentication, data integrity, access control, traceability, secure data exchange, and distributed trust management. Permissioned and edge-assisted architectures are generally regarded as more suitable for industrial constraints than resource-intensive public-chain designs. Even so, scalability, interoperability, latency, energy consumption, smart-contract robustness, and limited long-term industrial validation remain unresolved. Publications appearing after 2024 are discussed separately as a contextual update on Edge AI, TinyML, mobile edge computing, and zero-trust integration; they are not included in the 44-study review corpus.