ZONIA: A Zero-Trust Oracle System for Blockchain IoT Applications

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to significant data reliability and system transparency challenges, aggravated by the centralized nature of existing IoT architectures. This centralization often results in siloed data ecosystems, where interoperability issues and opaque data handling practices compromise both the utility and trustworthiness of IoT applications. To address these issues, we introduce zero-trust oracle network for IoT applications (ZONIAs), a novel blockchain oracle system designed to enhance data integrity and decentralization in IoT environments. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on trusted execution environment and centralized data sources, ZONIA utilizes a decentralized, zero-trust model that allows for anonymous participation and integrates multiple data sources to ensure fairness and reliability. This article outlines ZONIA’s architecture, which supports semantic and geospatial queries, details its data reliability mechanisms, and presents a comprehensive evaluation demonstrating its scalability and resilience against data falsification and collusion attacks. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate ZONIA’s scalability, showcasing its feasibility to handle an increasing number of nodes in the system under different system conditions and workloads. Furthermore, the implemented reputation mechanism significantly enhances data accuracy, maintaining high reliability even when 40% of nodes exhibit malicious behavior.