The rapid evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) environments has created an urgent need for secure and trustworthy distributed computing systems, particularly when dealing with heterogeneous devices and applications where centralized trust cannot be assumed. This paper proposes TrustMesh, a novel blockchain-enabled framework that addresses these challenges through a unique three-layer architecture combining permissioned blockchain technology with a novel multi-phase Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus protocol. The key innovation lies in TrustMesh's ability to support non-deterministic scheduling algorithms while maintaining Byzantine fault tolerance - features traditionally considered mutually exclusive in blockchain systems. The framework supports a sophisticated resource management approach that enables flexible scheduling decisions while preserving the security guarantees of blockchain-based verification. Our experimental evaluation using a real-world cold chain monitoring scenario demonstrates that TrustMesh successfully maintains Byzantine fault tolerance with fault detection latencies under 150 milliseconds, while maintaining consistent framework overhead across varying computational workloads even with network scaling. These results establish TrustMesh's effectiveness in balancing security, performance, and flexibility requirements in trustless IoT environments, advancing the state-of-the-art in secure distributed computing frameworks.
翻译:物联网(IoT)环境的快速发展对安全可信的分布式计算系统提出了迫切需求,尤其是在处理异构设备和应用程序时,无法假设存在集中式信任机制。本文提出TrustMesh,一种新颖的区块链赋能框架,通过结合许可区块链技术与创新的多阶段实用拜占庭容错(PBFT)共识协议的三层架构,应对这些挑战。其核心创新在于TrustMesh能够支持非确定性调度算法,同时保持拜占庭容错能力——这些特性在传统区块链系统中通常被认为是互斥的。该框架支持一种先进的资源管理方法,能够在保持基于区块链验证的安全保证的同时,实现灵活的调度决策。我们使用真实世界的冷链监控场景进行的实验评估表明,TrustMesh成功实现了拜占庭容错,故障检测延迟低于150毫秒,并且即使在网络扩展的情况下,也能在不同计算负载下保持一致的框架开销。这些结果证实了TrustMesh在无信任物联网环境中平衡安全性、性能与灵活性需求的有效性,推动了安全分布式计算框架的技术前沿。