Trustworthy IoT Services With Blockchain and Information-Centric Networking: A Survey
Wajid Rafique, Junaid Qadir, Melike Erol‐Kantarci · IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials · 2025
The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT)-generated content has given rise to efficient, secure, and scalable caching mechanisms to manage real-time data exchanges, driving the evolution of information-centric IoT architecture. However, centralized content distribution models introduce single points of failure, trust vulnerabilities, and scalability limitations, compromising the reliability and security of IoT services. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized, immutable, and tamper-resistant properties, offers a trustworthy caching framework, ensuring data authenticity, provenance, and secure access control, thereby ensuring trust in information-centric IoT. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the literature on Blockchain-based information-centric IoT services, systematically analyzing trust frameworks, security models, and identity management solutions. We examine Blockchain and information-centric networking synergies in establishing trust, preserving privacy, enhancing attack resilience, and ensuring fairness in content delivery in IoT services. Additionally, we provide a detailed taxonomy of the literature on trustworthy information-centric IoT, considering key parameters such as data provenance, lightweight consensus mechanisms, identity management, decentralized trust models, and smart contract-based access control. The survey also investigates real-world implementations of trustworthy information-centric IoT solutions, highlighting deployment-level performance metrics and design considerations to evaluate their practical feasibility. Finally, we outline future research directions, emphasizing the need for scalable lightweight consensus protocols, adaptive caching strategies, and privacy-aware access control mechanisms to advance trustworthy IoT caching architectures.