Redactable blockchain presents a solution for fraudulent transaction modification and storage overload by allowing limited data manipulation using Chameleon Hash Functions (CHF). However, CHF-based redactable blockchain encounters significant security challenges like misuse of edit rights, node desynchronization, higher transaction verification, and redaction latency. To solve these challenges, we propose SERB, a secure and efficient redactable blockchain protocol. SERB utilizes a Node Selection, Redactable Consensus, and novel Parameterized Chameleon Hash Function (pCHF) for proper use of edit rights and node synchronization with minimization of transaction verification and redaction latency. The security analysis shows that SERB is secured against tampering attacks, collusion attacks, and forged attacks. The performance analysis indicates that the SERB reduces transaction verification latency by 20% and minimizes redaction latency, such as transaction modification by 25 % and block deletion by$\mathbf{5 0 \%}$compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

The process of transferring land records (LRs) and ownership between users is facilitated by a LR transfer system. This system encompasses a series of procedures, including conducting title search, establishing agreements, executing legal documentation, verifying and transferring ownership, and updating LRs. Despite its importance, the system encounters notable challenges, such as insufficient tamper-proof record-keeping, lack of system compatibility, time-consuming processes, and the presence of intermediaries and brokers leading to potentially fraudulent claims. To address these challenges, a novel solution calledLandChainis proposed in this article. TheLandChainutilizes MultiChain, consisting of MainChain and SideChain, to securely transfer LRs among users, such as buyers, sellers, land donors, and owners. TheLandChainincorporates innovative algorithms like record forwarder selection (RFS), trust establishment (TE), and record transfer and confirmation (RTC). Furthermore,LandChainverifies the legitimacy of users before transferring LRs through the verify user legitimacy algorithm. Security analysis showsLandChainis secure from double-spending, liveness, Sybil, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The implementation ofLandChainis developed and tested on the docker engine platform. According to performance analysis, theLandChainreduces record confirmation latency by 18% (MultiChain) and 50% (Blockchain).LandChainalso increases throughput by 34% (MultiChain) and 45% (Blockchain) when compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Finance is the backbone of any organization or government. The government's financial health relies heavily on managing its FinTech applications. In the current FinTech system, user financial information is stored centrally. In the centralized system, the information security risks are high. Thus, a decentralized system is required for better security, trust and safety management in the FinTech information system. Blockchain is a decentralized technology that can solve the issues of traditional FinTech applications like banking. In the blockchain, consensus protocols are responsible for maintaining a consistent copy of the blockchain at each node of the blockchain network. However, these protocols are not suitable for regular currency transactions due to high latency and low throughput. Therefore, to achieve reliability, low latency, and high throughput, we have introduced a new protocol called FinBlock. In FinBlock, the pipeline concept is introduced in blockchain to increase the transaction throughput. Additionally, the number of message broadcasts is also reduced, which further improves the latency. Moreover, FinBlock achieves a speedup of 3 with respect to traditional practical byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus protocol. The result showed that FinBlock achieved better transaction processing time, transaction throughput, and message count than the traditional PBFT, even with hundreds of nodes in the network with reduced message complexity.

With the advent of cross-chain, moving assets across blockchain is now possible on a decentralized network. In a decentralized environment, asset transfer to a random blockchain would eliminate committing to a single blockchain. Many domains, such as banking, smart healthcare, smart homes, and the industrial internet of things (IIoT), benefit from cross-chain applications of blockchain. Cross-chain implementation is still in its infancy and confronts issues in preserving many of the asset's features when transferred across the network. Using cross-chain for asset transfers necessitates the presence of five essential characteristics: non-repudiation, unlinkability, confidentiality, atomicity, and interoperability. We proposed CrossLedger, a new Cross-chain based technique for asset transfer that includes all of the features mentioned above. To keep the qualities described above, the CrossLedger uses a novel Asset Forwarder Selection (AFS), Trust Establishment (TE), and Asset Transfer and Confirmation (ATC) algorithms. The proof of characteristics demonstrates that CrossLedger supports all the aforementioned features for asset transfer. The security analysis proved that CrossLedger is protected from double-spending, liveness, and Sybil attacks.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enables vehicles and Road-Side-Unit to communicate and exchange data, promising to improve transportation safety, efficiency, and convenience. However, to realize the full potential of IoV, secure and fast traffic accident information (TAI) communication among IoV nodes are essential. The Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)-based blockchain for IoV secures TAI; it is prone to high message overhead and transaction latency, which causes TAI transmission between IoV nodes to be delayed. This paper proposes a new consensus algorithm, named HN-mPBFT (Healthy Node based Modified PBFT), specifically designed for IoV. The HN-mPBFT consensus method reduces message overhead and transaction delay by reducing PBFT consensus phases while achieving consensus among healthy nodes. According to security analysis, HN-mPBFT is secure from Sybil and DDoS attacks. Performance analysis shows that HN-mPBFT reduces transaction latency by 50%.

Clustering plays a vital role in establishing a more stable global network topology in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs) and supports Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications and message routing. However, due to the unstable infrastructure of VANETs, cluster size and geographical span have a significant impact on maintaining cluster stability and network efficiency. Thus, this paper presents a hybrid machine learning (ML) and meta-heuristics (MH) based routing scheme called MetoidS to support scalability, enhance the stability of the network topology, and provide efficient routing. We incorporate vehicle orientation-based unsupervised clustering and population based MH to provide a new direction to the taxonomy of the approaches to handling efficient route discovery and cluster maintenance challenges. To represent a real-world simulation of our approach, we have conducted the experiments using a combination of four frameworks (i.e., OMNeT++, SUMO, VEINS, and INET) that demonstrate better performance in terms of high cluster stability, enhanced throughput, high packet delivery ratio, and minimizes average transmission delay compared to the existing routing protocols used in this research.

In the Internet of Things (IoT), devices can interconnect and communicate autonomously, which requires devices to authenticate each other to exchange meaningful information. Otherwise, these things become vulnerable to various attacks. The conventional security protocols are not suitable for IoT applications due to the high computation and storage demand. Therefore, we proposed a blockchain-enabled secure storage and communication scheme for IoT applications, called BSS. The scheme ensures identification, authentication, and data integrity. Our scheme uses the security advantages of blockchain and helps to create safe zones (trust batch) where authenticated objects interconnect securely and do communication. A secure and robust trust mechanism is employed to build these batches, where each device has to authenticate itself before joining the trust batch. The obtained results satisfy the IoT security requirements with 60% reduced computation, storage and communication cost compared with state-of-the-art schemes. BSS also withstands various cyberattacks such as impersonation, message replay, man-in-the-middle, and botnet attacks.