Cross-Chain and Energy-Efficient Intrusion Detection for IoT Security using Smart Contracts and Machine Learning

Abstract

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) systems with blockchain-based security mechanisms offers improved trust, auditability, and decentralization, but introduces significant challenges related to interoperability, transaction latency, and energy consumption at the network edge. Most existing blockchain-assisted intrusion detection systems (IDS) are limited to single-ledger deployments and rely on computationally intensive machine-learning inference, which restricts their applicability in resource-constrained IoT environments. Presented in the work is a cross-chain and energy-efficient intrusion detection framework that combines lightweight machine-learning–based anomaly detection with smart-contract–driven verification and interoperable blockchain communication. Intrusion detection models are optimized using pruning and INT8 quantization to reduce inference overhead on IoT gateways, while verified intrusion alerts are securely propagated across heterogeneous blockchain platforms through cross-chain messaging protocols. Smart contracts automate alert validation and response actions, enabling coordinated defense across multiple ledgers. Experimental evaluation using CICIDS2017 and BoT-IoT datasets, physical IoT gateway hardware, and a multi-chain blockchain testbed demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves a detection accuracy of 97.4%, reduces inference energy consumption by up to 56%, and improves alert propagation latency by 42% compared to single-chain baselines. These results indicate that decentralized, interoperable, and energy-aware intrusion detection is feasible for large-scale IoT deployments.