Blockchain is the underlying technology of a number of digital cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is a chain of blocks that store information with digital signatures in a decentralized and distributed network. The features of blockchain, including decentralization, immutability, transparency and auditability, make transactions more secure and tamper proof. Apart from cryptocurrency, blockchain technology can be used in financial and social services, risk management, healthcare facilities, and so on. A number of research studies focus on the opportunity that blockchain provides in various application domains. This paper presents a comparative study of the tradeoffs of blockchain and also explains the taxonomy and architecture of blockchain, provides a comparison among different consensus mechanisms and discusses challenges, including scalability, privacy, interoperability, energy consumption and regulatory issues. In addition, this paper also notes the future scope of blockchain technology.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promises automation, efficiency, and data-driven decision-making by real-time data collection and analysis. However, traditional IIoT architectures are cloud-centric and, therefore, struggle to handle large volumes of data, edge bandwidth constraints, and data confidentiality. Distributed edge-to-cloud computing emerges as a potential solution, also paving the ground for edge-to-cloud data analytics and distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to obtain insights for decision-making and predictive maintenance. Despite the potential, however, there is a lack of comprehensive studies identifying key requirements for distributed edge-to-cloud IIoT and analyzing to what extent emerging IoT platforms meet those requirements. The scope of this article is to survey existing literature to identify key requirements in IIoT from the perspective of distributed edge-to-cloud computing. We provide a comparative analysis of three prominent IoT platforms, namely ThingsBoard, Eclipse Ditto, and Microsoft Azure IoT, and assess how these platforms meet the key IIoT requirements. Finally, we identify open challenges and potential research opportunities based on the insights gained from the analysis of the three IoT platforms, thereby setting the stage for future work.

The rapid expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) has added complexity to the resilience and security challenges to the EV charging systems, especially owing to the exposure to the cyber–physical threats and the reliance on centrally coordinated systems. Although the previous literature has discussed the use of blockchain in the context of smart grids and mobility services; its implementation to improve the resilience of EV charging, particularly when integrated with cybersecurity systems, is still insufficiently synthesized. Despite these issues, critical gaps persist in terms of scalability, interoperability, and cybersecurity enforcement. This study presents an exploratory literature review that examines the intersection of blockchain and cybersecurity enabled applications and introduces a comparative framework evaluating the conventional security controls with blockchain based cybersecurity solutions to improve the resilience of EV charging infrastructure. The authors analyzed 70 studies published between 2018 and 2025 to determine the security weaknesses and map them to decentralized solutions. Reported threats, security mechanisms, architectural decisions, and levels of validation were grouped and reviewed critically in the patterns of limitations with respect to scalability, interoperability, and deployment maturity. Through the synthesis of fragmented results in cross disciplinary research, the paper finds the main gaps in research and comparative research results that could be used as a comprehensive reference in future studies and system design in resilient EV charging infrastructures.

Traditional methods of reaching consensus in monetary systems depend on centralized authorities that are considered trustworthy. Blockchain challenges the traditional model by establishing consensus through a decentralized network of peers, which is responsible for validating transactions and preserving a chronologically ordered ledger of transactions. Utilizing blockchain technology has extended beyond cryptocurrencies to encompass various industrial systems. Nevertheless, much ambiguity surrounds the benefits of employing blockchain technology compared to competing technological solutions. The limited adoption of blockchain-based systems can be attributed to the absence of clear guidelines on blockchain governance and the difficulty in evaluating the pros and cons of blockchain solutions. The existence of various blockchain variants, including permissionless and permissioned, can provide challenges in selecting an appropriate solution for a given use case. This article aims to tackle these difficulties by analyzing blockchain governance and its associated tradeoffs, encompassing energy usage, consensus mechanisms, performance, and security considerations. We present a taxonomy guideline that aims to offer valuable insights into the tradeoffs involved and assist in efficiently selecting the appropriate governance structure for blockchain-based solutions across different scenarios. The taxonomy under consideration examines several characteristics of blockchain technology, encompassing energy consumption, consensus techniques, performance, and security elements. These factors are analyzed to provide an appropriate governance model for a blockchain-based solution, such as permissionless, permissioned, or consortium. Moreover, this research study presents a comprehensive evaluation of various consensus mechanisms, including Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and Proof of Authority (PoA), while taking into account significant characteristics.

Open-cry electronic auctions have revolutionized the landscape of high-value transactions for buying and selling goods. Online platforms such as eBay and Tradera have popularized these auctions due to their global accessibility and convenience. However, these centralized auctioning platforms rely on trust in a central entity to manage and control the processing of bids, e.g., the submission time and validity. The use of blockchain technologies for constructing decentralized systems has gained popularity for their versatility and useful properties toward decentralization. However, blockchain-based open-cry auctions, are sensitive to the order of transactions and deadlines which, in the absence of a governing party, need to be provided in the system design. In this paper, we identify the key properties for the development of decentralized open-cry auctioning systems, including verifiability, transaction immutability, ordering, and time synchronization. Three prominent blockchain platforms, namely, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and R3 Corda were analyzed in terms of their capabilities to ensure these properties for gap identification. We propose a solution design that addresses these key properties and presents a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation of such design. Our PoC uses Hyperledger Fabric and mitigates the identified gaps related to the time synchronization of this system by utilizing an external component. During the chaincode execution, the creation and submission of bids initiate requests to the time service API. This API service retrieves trusted timestamps from NTP services to obtain accurate bid times. We then analyzed the system design and implementation in the context of the identified key properties. Lastly, we conducted a performance evaluation of the time service and the PoC system implementation in time-sensitive scenarios and assessed its overall performance.

The transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) presents significant challenges for modern computing environments due to increased computational overhead, communication latency, and implementation complexity. Existing evaluation methods typically focus on isolated cryptographic performance metrics and do not provide a unified framework for assessing the overall resilience of PQC deployments across heterogeneous systems. This paper introduces the Quantum Encryption Resilience Score (QERS), a novel system-level evaluation framework designed to quantify the resilience of post-quantum cryptographic implementations by integrating computational, network, and operational performance metrics into a single composite score. QERS provides a standardized methodology for comparing PQC algorithms across diverse deployment scenarios. In this study, the framework is experimentally evaluated using a heterogeneous ESP32-based embedded and IoT testbed with gateway-assisted post-quantum cryptographic processing. The proposed framework is validated through experimental implementations of the NIST-standardized ML-KEM key encapsulation mechanism and the ML-DSA digital signature algorithm under multiple communication protocols and heterogeneous hardware configurations. Experimental results demonstrate that QERS effectively distinguishes the trade-offs between security, computational efficiency, resource utilization, and communication performance, providing a practical decision-support framework for selecting appropriate PQC implementations. The proposed framework contributes a reproducible and extensible methodology for the system-level evaluation of post-quantum cryptography and establishes a foundation for future research into standardized resilience and trust assessment of quantum-resistant systems.