Blockchain-Enabled Secure Data Sharing Framework for Internet of Things Networks

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables continuous sensing, automation, and data exchange across smart homes, healthcare, industrial systems, transportation, agriculture, and other cyber-physical environments. However, conventional IoT data-sharing architectures often depend on centralized cloud servers, creating concerns related to unauthorized access, single points of failure, data tampering, privacy leakage, and limited auditability. Blockchain can strengthen trust by providing a decentralized, tamper-resistant ledger and programmable smart contracts, but direct on-chain storage of high-volume IoT data is impractical because of latency, storage, and resource constraints. This methodology paper proposes a hybrid blockchain-enabled secure data-sharing framework in which IoT data are encrypted and stored off-chain while cryptographic hashes, access policies, identity records, and audit events are maintained on a permissioned blockchain. Smart contracts enforce fine-grained authorization, and edge gateways reduce the computation burden on constrained devices. The proposed methodology evaluates confidentiality, integrity, authorization correctness, transaction latency, throughput, storage overhead, and scalability. An illustrative benchmark demonstrates how the framework can reduce unauthorized access risk and improve traceability while preserving acceptable sharing latency. The methodology integrates ideas from blockchain-based privacy, smart contracts, IoT access control, and hybrid on-chain/off-chain architectures and is designed for reproducible implementation in secure IoT environments.