Abstract
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) play a critical role in protecting modern networks, but traditional centralized designs raise serious concerns regarding data privacy, trust, and scalability. Federated Learning (FL) reduces privacy risks through decentralized model training, and blockchain enhances trust by providing immutability and transparency. Combining these technologies creates a promising paradigm for secure and trustworthy IDS. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of blockchain-federated IDS with a particular focus on privacy and trust. The key contribution is a multi-dimensional taxonomy that integrates IDS architectures, FL strategies, blockchain types, and consensus mechanisms, providing a clear and structured view of this emerging field. We categorize threats into data, communication, and model levels, and map representative defense mechanisms to each. We also review applications in vehicular networks, industrial and medical Internet of Things (IoT), and metaverse scenarios. Finally, we highlight key challenges, including non-IID data, lightweight consensus, incentive mechanisms, and poisoning-resilient aggregation, and outline future research directions.
Keywords
intrusion detection systems
federated learning
blockchain
privacy
trust
Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Funding
This work was supported without any funding.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Ethical Approval and Consent to Participate
Not applicable.
Cite This Article
APA Style
Cao, Y., Ku, C. S., Kumar, R. & Khan, A. (2025). Privacy and Trust in Blockchain-Federated Intrusion Detection Systems: Taxonomy, Challenges and Perspectives. Journal of Reliable and Secure Computing, 1(1), 4–24. https://doi.org/10.62762/JRSC.2025.399812
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