Secure blockchain integrated deep learning framework for federated risk-adaptive and privacy-preserving IoT edge...

An enormous demand for a secure, scalable, intelligent edge computing framework has emerged for the exponentially increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for any substrate of modern digital infrastructure. These edge nodes distributed across heterogeneous environments serve as primary interfaces for sensing, computation, and actuations. Their physical deployment in unattended scenarios puts them at risk of being targets for resource manipulation. One widely accepted IoT architecture with traditional notions of edge may consider a threat to its centralized knowledge with an unbounded attack surface that includes anything that can remotely connect to the edge from the cloud-like domain. Existing strategies either forget the dynamic risk context of edge nodes or do not achieve a reasonable trade-off between security and resource constraints, essentially degrading the robustness and trustworthiness of solutions intended for real-life scenarios. To address the existing gaps, the work presents a novel Blockchain Integrated Deep Learning Framework for secure IoT edge computing, introducing a hybrid architecture where the transparency of blockchain meets deep learning flexibility. The proposed system incorporates five specialized components: Blockchain-Orchestrated Federated Curriculum Learning (BOFCL), which ensures risk-prioritized training using threat indices derived from blockchain logs; this adaptive sequencing enhances responsiveness to high-risk edge scenarios. Zero-Knowledge Proof Enabled Secure Inference Engine (ZK-SIE) provides verifiable privacy-preserving inference, ensuring model integrity without exposing input data or model internals in process. Blockchain Indexed Adversarial Attack Simulator (BI-AAS) focuses on testing the models in edge environments against attack scenarios drawn from common adversarial profiles and thereby facilitates a model defensive retraining. Energy-Aware Lightweight Consensus with Adaptive Synchronization (ELCAS) avoids overhead by seeking energy-efficient participants for global model synchronization in constrained environments. Trust Indexed Model Provenance and Deployment Ledger (TIMPDL) ensures model lineage tracking and deploy ability in a transparent manner by providing composite trust scores computed from data quality, node reputation, and validation metrics. Altogether, the framework combines the data integrity, adversarial robustness, and trust-aware deployment, shortening training latency, synchronization energy, and privacy leakage. It is a foundational advancement supporting secure decentralized edge intelligence for next-generation IoT ecosystems.