Ensuring Zero Trust IoT Data Privacy: Differential Privacy in Blockchain Using Federated Learning

In the increasingly digitized world, the privacy and security of sensitive data shared via IoT devices are paramount. Traditional privacy-preserving methods like k-anonymity and l-diversity are becoming outdated due to technological advancements. In addition, data owners often worry about misuse and unauthorized access to their personal information. To address this, we propose a secure data-sharing framework that uses local differential privacy (LDP) within a permissioned blockchain, enhanced by federated learning (FL) in a zero-trust environment. To further protect sensitive data shared by IoT devices, we use the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and cryptographic hash functions to create unique digital fingerprints for files. We mainly evaluate our system based on latency, throughput, privacy accuracy, and transaction efficiency, comparing the performance to a benchmark model. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms its counterpart in terms of latency, throughput, and transaction efficiency. The proposed model achieved a lower average latency of 4.0 seconds compared to the benchmark model’s 5.3 seconds. In terms of throughput, the proposed model achieved a higher throughput of 10.53 TPS (transactions per second) compared to the benchmark model’s 8 TPS. Furthermore, the proposed system achieves 85% accuracy, whereas the counterpart achieves only 49%.