Zero Trust Web Application FireWall using blockchain
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Date
2026
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
New Horizon College of Engineering
Abstract
The rapid growth of remote work and the Internet of Things (IoT) has, in the recent digital world, led to the disappearance of traditional network perimeters and, as a result, the users are more and more exposed to highly sophisticated web attacks. In case that a user connects to a sensitive application through an untrusted public network, the user is exposed to significant risks due to the possible occurrence of such exploits as SQL Injection (SQLi) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). In general, security solutions like static Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are not able to identify recently emerged attack patterns and have a serious architectural problem, i.e., they depend on centralized logging databases that attackers can modify or delete to hide their actions.
In order to fix these security issues, this work develops a mobile Zero Trust Web Application Firewall (WAF) that can be positioned at the network edge by means of a Raspberry Pi. The device, by application of the "Zero Trust" model—requiring a very thorough check of each data packet—acts as an automatic safety gateway. It uses a Machine Learning-based detection engine, which implements a Logistic Regression algorithm together with TF-IDF vectorization, to perform the analysis of the HTTP request payloads on-the-fly. This in turn enables the device to make the right decision between the normal traffic and the sophisticated attack traffic with a very high degree of accuracy.
Besides that, to enhance the level of data security, the system adopts Blockchain technology for impervious auditing. Each prevented threat is encrypted, signed, and logged through a Solidity Smart Contract on a private Ethereum blockchain. This results in a distributed, intervention-free record of security incidents, which is the ultimate proof of the attempted attacks. The envisaged system is an excellent example of the successful convergence of the Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain technologies