Secure OTA and Logging in Smart Devices via Blockchain Evaluation

The rise of Intelligent Consumer Electronics (ICE), including smart home hubs and wearable devices, requires decentralized mechanisms for secure firmware validation, access control, and tamper-resistant logging. Centralized systems remain vulnerable to spoofed updates, opaque logging practices, and limited scalability. To address these challenges, we present a blockchain-based framework that integrates hash-based firmware verification, smart contract-backed access logging, elliptic curve signatures, and TLS-secured transport. Our evaluation, conducted on constrained device profiles (1 vCPU, 512MB RAM, 10 Mbps bandwidth), employed four platforms: Hyperledger Fabric (Raft), IOTA (Tangle), Algorand, and Ethereum (PoA). IOTA demonstrated the lowest latency (220 ms) and minimal resource consumption (42MB RAM, 34% CPU), while Algorand achieved peak throughput (910 tx/s) with 95% consistency. Ethereum-PoA minimized storage requirements (2.8MB per 1,000 logs), whereas Fabric exhibited higher latency (570 ms) and resource load (74MB RAM, 51% CPU) but provided strong audit guarantees. Spoofed firmware was rejected in 100% of cases, and unauthorized logs were blocked in over 97.5% of attempts. Privacy was ensured using pseudonymous identifiers and selective logging. Adversarial dynamics such as packet loss, jamming, and consensus forking were modeled. Despite partial offloading to a gateway node, auditability and verification upheld decentralized trust. These results confirm the feasibility of blockchain-secured ICE and its resilience to both operational and adversarial threats.