Blockchain-Integrated Cybersecurity Architectures

The field of cybersecurity is experiencing profound shifts as the digital landscape grows more complex and critical assets become increasingly interconnected. With the expansion of sectors such as finance, healthcare, education, and government services into the digital domain, traditional centralized security paradigms face mounting pressure from highly sophisticated cyber threats. Recent developments reveal significant gaps within current systems, including vulnerabilities to insider threats, large-scale credential compromises, and supply-chain attacks. Advanced adversaries have continuously found ways to bypass conventional safeguards, highlighting the need for innovative trust and security mechanisms. In response, blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative approach due to its decentralized trust model, immutable ledger, and cryptographic underpinnings—qualities that are now being explored well beyond its cryptocurrency origins. Despite promising advances, the practical integration of blockchain into cybersecurity remains challenging, particularly in addressing concerns related to scalability, interoperability, and regulatory compliance.

This Research Topic aims to investigate how blockchain technology can fundamentally reshape cybersecurity architectures for enhanced resilience, transparency, and privacy. It seeks to understand how blockchain can serve as a foundation for secure identity management, distributed access control, threat intelligence sharing, digital forensics, and IoT and cloud protection. The main objectives include evaluating novel design paradigms, empirically validating integration strategies, and rigorously analyzing the interplay of privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs within blockchain-enabled environments. Moreover, the research intends to critically assess and distinguish viable, scalable real-world implementations from speculative or concept-only solutions, with a focus on emerging enterprise and infrastructure needs.

The scope of this Research Topic encompasses both theoretical and applied research on blockchain-integrated cybersecurity, with an emphasis on realistically addressing contemporary threats and technological constraints. Submissions should present interdisciplinary approaches and may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

- Blockchain-based identity management and decentralized authentication

- Distributed access control and secure trust anchors for zero-trust architectures

- Blockchain applications in secure logging, auditing, and digital forensics

- Privacy-preserving and confidential communication using advanced cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs

- Threat intelligence sharing and collaborative defense mechanisms via blockchain

- Security frameworks for IoT, cloud, and critical infrastructure leveraging blockchain

- Usability, scalability, regulatory, and ethical dimensions of blockchain deployment in cybersecurity

- Governance models and compliance-aware blockchain architectures

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Blockchain cybersecurity, Decentralized identity, Zero-trust architecture, Access control, Threat intelligence, Digital forensics, Zero-knowledge proofs, IoT security, Cloud security, Regulatory compliance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.