Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing Using Blockchain for Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

This manuscript investigates a novel framework for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing within critical infrastructure environments utilizing blockchain technology. Critical infrastructure sectors—including energy, water, transportation, and healthcare—face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that demand rapid, reliable, and tamper-proof intelligence exchange among stakeholders. Traditional CTI sharing mechanisms often rely on centralized repositories or trusted third parties, introducing single points of failure, data integrity concerns, and delays. By leveraging a permissioned blockchain network, our approach ensures decentralized governance, immutability of shared intelligence, fine-grained access control, and comprehensive auditability. We design and implement a prototype on Hyperledger Fabric, define smart contracts for automated intelligence registration, querying, and revocation, and evaluate performance via both empirical statistical analysis and large-scale simulation studies. The prototype integrates off-chain secure storage for CTI artifacts, storing only metadata hashes on-chain to balance confidentiality with transparency.

Empirical results demonstrate that blockchain-enabled CTI sharing achieves data integrity and non-repudiation guarantees, reduces intelligence dissemination latency by up to 35 %, and maintains throughput above 180 transactions per second under realistic loads. Simulation experiments reveal resilience to node churn and orderer-level attacks, with system recovery times under 120 seconds and graceful performance degradation at scale. We discuss deployment considerations, governance models, policy enforcement via smart contracts, scalability challenges, and future directions including privacy-enhancing techniques and cross-sector federation. This work substantiates blockchain’s viability as a backbone for collaborative defense in critical infrastructure contexts.