Lightweight Cryptography and Blockchain Synergies in IoT Trust Management
V. Bhoopathy, Bramah Hazela · 2025
The convergence of lightweight cryptography and blockchain technology offers a transformative approach to trust management in the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly within resource-constrained environments. Traditional security models fall short in addressing the dual demands of scalability and efficiency, prompting the need for hybrid frameworks that integrate cryptographic minimalism with decentralized trust mechanisms. This chapter presents a comprehensive design and evaluation of hybrid lightweight blockchain-cryptography frameworks tailored for secure, energy-efficient, and privacy-preserving trust management in distributed IoT networks. It explores system design trade-offs, secure data aggregation techniques, and immutable storage strategies while introducing edge-assisted trust computation to offload intensive operations. Advanced privacy-preserving methods, such as zero-knowledge proofs and differential privacy, are incorporated to mitigate data exposure risks inherent to transparent blockchain infrastructures. The proposed architecture was aligned with practical deployment scenarios and threat models, delivering scalable, low-latency, and tamper-resistant trust infrastructures for heterogeneous IoT ecosystems. The chapter closes by identifying key research gaps and future directions necessary to standardize and optimize such hybrid frameworks across diverse application domains.