A secure and scalable blockchain-assisted authentication framework for decentralized IoT data management

Over the past few years, IoT devices have witnessed an unprecedented growth rate, disrupting most industries, such as healthcare, home automation, transport, and manufacturing. Despite this, the growth has also opened the IoT networks to high vulnerability to security risks, including data breaches, unauthorized access, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, because of their centralized structure and insufficient computing resources. The main issue is that there is no strong, scalable, and decentralized security structure that could guarantee data integrity, authenticate, and establish trust between the heterogeneous IoT-based devices. This paper will overcome these shortcomings by outlining a blockchain-based secure IoT system named BASIS (Blockchain-Assisted Secure IoT System) in this paper. The model incorporates a lightweight Proof of Authentication (PoA) consensus mechanism, cryptographic data protection, and smart contract-based access control to facilitate decentralized authentication and tamper-resistant data management. In the suggested architecture, PoA is used to validate transactions and cryptographic identities are used to register IoT nodes to minimize computational and energy overheads. Smart contracts are used to implement access control policies and are not based on centralized authorities. A pre-processing attention-based learning modules are also introduced in the system to cater to anomaly finding and adaptive trust-assessment. The experimental outcome shows that BASIS improves the network resilience, minimizes the data validation latency and has a better throughput than the conventional IoT security schemes. In addition, the strategy reduces energy consumption and computational overhead, using optimized consensus protocols, and can be used in resource-constrained IoT settings. To sum up, the offered blockchain framework is a good way to enhance the security of IoT networks with the sources of decentralized trust, data immutability, and scalability, which leads to the future of secure IoT ecosystems. The proposed BASIS approach had better performance: 95 TPS throughput, 200 ms latency, 95 J energy use, 99.5% data integrity, 78% scalability efficiency, and 210 ms validation speed.