SPHERE: A Secure Provenance-Aware Hierarchical Ecosystem for Reliable Edge Computing Services

Edge computing is revolutionizing digital infrastructures by enabling low-latency processing, bandwidth optimization, and real-time decision-making across applications like IoT, smart cities, and industrial automation. However, its decentralized nature introduces significant security challenges, making trust and accountability crucial for reliable service delivery. Secure provenance management is vital to address these challenges, ensuring that distributed services and high data volumes are protected from tampering and unauthorized access. This research presents SPHERE, a scalable framework that integrates distributed ledgers, digital signatures, and cryptographic techniques to ensure service integrity and traceability. By leveraging blockchain for tamper-proof provenance, EdgeX Foundry for service orchestration, and an off-chain database for load balancing, our approach enhances security while maintaining system performance. Empirical analysis through a proof-of-concept deployment on a virtualized testbed validates its effectiveness in strengthening service reliability, auditability, and compliance, addressing critical gaps in edge service security and underscoring the importance of secure provenance-awareness in decentralized environments.