IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2024 - 101

Delay Attack In this attack, the attacker disrupts
block transfer between network partners.
The attacker targets the path to seize blocks, holds
them for 20-30 minutes, and then sends them to
the miner. Because of this, miners expend resources
while acquiring current block data.
Smart Contract Threats
The absence of smart contract guidelines places
most of the responsibility on the organization,
exposing contract data to risk. Like in the
Data Access Object instance, the executed smart
contract may not reflect the parties' initial purpose
and most cyberattacks/technical failures
target smart contracts as the execution of smart
contracts does not require physical appearance,
making the prospect for fraud or forgery high.
Ethereum is one of the most successful innovative
contract blockchains. This Turing-Complete
program is composed of low-level byte code that
the Ethereum virtual machine runs.
Source Code Vulnerabilities The term
" code vulnerability " refers to a flaw in a software
protection system. It is a weakness in our programming
that puts our data at risk of being
hacked. By linking an outlet to the code, hackers
will be able to retrieve data, interfere with the
software system, or even worse, eradicate it.
Blockchain Vulnerabilities User transactions
initiate preconfigured smart contracts, but
they are not necessarily guaranteed to execute in
the identical configuration when different transactions
invoke the corresponding smart contract in
parallel, also called transaction-ordering reliance.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Despite the edge networks bringing cloud
resources at the edge of the network, several critical
challenges need to be addressed in applying
blockchain for cybersecurity in edge networks.
Some of the leading research challenges are discussed
as follows.
Integration of federated learning and blockchain
technology into edge networks for
cybersecurity and privacy is one of the critical
aspects. Federated learning can train
the data locally with the set of distributed
January/February 2024
edge/fog devices and the centralized cloud
manager can train the whole network with
higher cybersecurity using a global aggregator
and blockchain technology. This mechanism
can provide higher security and privacy of the
real-time IoT applications while reducing congestion
and overhead of the edge network during
network training and data analytics.
The fifth iteration of the industrial revolution is
nowadays populated by a set of smart and
interconnected sensors and computingdevices
that need to communicate with each otherwith
critical infrastructures to orchestrate services
and process the data at the edge of the network.11
Hence, Industry 5.0 is operated through
multiple technologies that need to cooperate
to provide efficient services and provide cybersecurity
in the overall networks. To guarantee
the overall network cybersecurity, and attack
detection, blockchain technology needs to be
introduced at the edge of the network for protecting
IoT applications from intruders.
Integration of advanced communication technology,
i.e., beyond 5G or 6G, and decentralized
blockchain technology in edge networks
can reduce the communication overhead of
real-time IoT applications while providing
higher cybersecurity for protecting data from
the digital world. Besides that, in the blockchain-enabled
edge framework, the participating
computing devices collect the sensory
or trained data as a new block and validate
the data using consensus protocol.
In the coming decade, the global sustainable
and social development policies for IoTapplications
in industrial networks have been influenced
by two major negotiations such as the
green economy concept and sustainable developmentgoals.12
An analysis of the social IoT developments
showed that most of the recently
developed social projects concentrate on five
sustainabledevelopment goals, including social
IIoT systems, affordable and clean energy,
green communication and computation, fog/
edge infrastructure, and cybersecurity.13 Thus,
one of the critical aspects is to develop a sustainable
and secure green edge infrastructure
for IoT applications using advanced learning
andblockchain technology for providing higher
efficiency and cybersecurity of the network.
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2024

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