Secure Over the Air and Logging in Smart Devices via Blockchain Evaluation: Blockchain Protocols for Intelligent Consumer Electronics Security
Usama Arshad, Abdallah Tubaishat, Fawaz Khaled Alarfaj, Nazik Alturki, Sajid Anwar, Zahid Halim · IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine · 2025
The rise of Intelligent Consumer Electronics (ICE), including smart home hubs and wearable devices, requires decentralized mechanisms for secure firmware validation, access control, and tamper-resistant logging. Centralized systems remain vulnerable to spoofed updates, opaque logging practices, and limited scalability. To address these challenges, we present a blockchain-based framework that integrates hash-based firmware verification, smart contract-backed access logging, elliptic curve signatures, and TLS-secured transport. Our evaluation, conducted on constrained device profiles (1 vCPU, 512MB RAM, 10 Mbps bandwidth), employed four platforms: Hyperledger Fabric (Raft), IOTA (Tangle), Algorand, and Ethereum (PoA). IOTA demonstrated the lowest latency (220 ms) and minimal resource consumption (42MB RAM, 34% CPU), while Algorand achieved peak throughput (910 tx/s) with 95% consistency. Ethereum-PoA minimized storage requirements (2.8MB per 1,000 logs), whereas Fabric exhibited higher latency (570 ms) and resource load (74MB RAM, 51% CPU) but provided strong audit guarantees. Spoofed firmware was rejected in 100% of cases, and unauthorized logs were blocked in over 97.5% of attempts. Privacy was ensured using pseudonymous identifiers and selective logging. Adversarial dynamics such as packet loss, jamming, and consensus forking were modeled. Despite partial offloading to a gateway node, auditability and verification upheld decentralized trust. These results confirm the feasibility of blockchain-secured ICE and its resilience to both operational and adversarial threats.