Blockchain-Enabled Zero Trust Architecture for Privacy-Preserving Cybersecurity in Industrial IoT Environments

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deployments interconnect sensors, programmable logic controllers, supervisory control and data acquisition nodes, industrial gateways, databases, and administrative applications. This connectivity improves automation and operational visibility, but it also expands the attack surface and exposes industrial environments to stolen credentials, compromised devices, replayed requests, excessive privileges, and altered centralized security logs. This paper presents a synopsis-aligned blockchain-enabled Zero Trust architecture for privacy-preserving cybersecurity in software-simulated IIoT environments. A FastAPI gateway serves as the policy decision and enforcement point. It evaluates every request based on device registration, device state, JSON Web Token validity, role permissions, timestamp freshness, endpoint authorization, and payload plausibility. Authorized telemetry is retained in MongoDB for efficient querying, whereas compact security events are written through Web3.py to a Solidity smart contract deployed on a local Ganache Ethereum network. A React dashboard provides telemetry monitoring, device and role administration, revocation, security alerts, and blockchain-backed audit verification. The architecture deliberately separates high-volume operational data from tamper-evident audit metadata, thereby reducing unnecessary on-chain disclosure and transaction overhead. The paper specifies the system model, formal access rules, on-chain/off-chain data model, algorithms, threat-control mapping, implementation plan, and a reproducible evaluation methodology for blocking effectiveness, false acceptance, false rejection, latency, throughput, blockchain overhead, and tamper detection. No unmeasured experimental performance claims are reported.