A Trusted Audit Architecture Using CP-ABE and Lightweight Blockchain for Industry 4.0

The deep integration of Cyber–Physical Systems (CPSs) and embedded devices within Industry 4.0 has intensified security risks, particularly concerning data integrity and access control in resource-constrained environments. While blockchain offers decentralized trust for industrial infrastructures, its computational intensity poses significant challenges to the performance and security of embedded platforms. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight, blockchain-based security architecture tailored for Industry 4.0 architectures. By integrating Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) with a resource-efficient consensus mechanism, the proposed architecture establishes a multi-level root of trust to ensure secure data distribution and fine-grained access control across the system lifecycle. Under the evaluated simulation settings, the proposed lightweight consensus reduces the modeled hash-operation count by approximately 85% compared with Proof of Work (PoW) and improves the stability measure by 11.6% relative to PoW and 4.3% relative to Proof of Authority (PoA), while showing stronger alignment between node resource capability and election outcomes. These results provide proof-of-concept support for the proposed lightweight consensus mechanism in resource-constrained industrial audit environments.