SecureBlock: An ML-Blockchain Consumer-Centric Sustainable Solution for Industry 5.0

Consumer Electronics (CE) are defined as one of the emerging trends where smart devices, such as refrigerators, smart phones, or house hold devices, generate a huge amount of information by communicating among each other without any human intervention. Yet, the speed of producing such products greatly differs from what would be an optimal utilization and integration of such devices in the environment. In addition, generating and transmitting huge amounts of data within heterogeneous networks produces e-wastage (excessive storage, energy and computational requirements) that further leads to environmental crises, and that can raise severe security problems in terms of network trustworthiness, as the information is conveyed using an open channel, i.e., the Internet. In this regard, most of the solutions reported in the literature are inadequate to handle the aforementioned issues. Hence, in this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to secure the information transmission in one of the most relevant applications of CE, i.e., IIoT networks, using an ML-based Hidden Markov Model (HMM) whereby we compute the degree of trust associated to the different devices based on a blockchain mechanism. In our proposal, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used to inspect the continuous behaviour of each node, and a blockchain network ensures the transparency and security in the network. The proposed technique is validated against existing mechanisms using various security metrics. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique is more effective in terms of malicious node identification in comparison to existing schemes.