BLOCKCHAIN-BASED APPROACHES FOR PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN IOT APPLICATIONS: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Internet of Things (IoT) has gripped domains with this ubiquitous connectivity, in-themoment data collection, and autonomous decision-making. But rising numbers of heterogeneous, extremely constrained IoT devices pose serious concerns regarding data privacy, security, and trust management, drawing great attention into these areas in the academic field and on all sides. Thus, blockchain technology came into the limelight for strengthening security and privacy in IoT systems in a decentralized manner, giving the system immutability, transparency, and distributed trust. This study proposes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of blockchain-based approaches that aim to enhance the IoT applications' privacy and security, focusing chiefly on healthcare, supply chains, and smart cities. The review uses a structured methodology to find, select, evaluate, and synthesize relevant peer-reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2025 taken from major scientific databases such as IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and Scopus. Articles were also examined to narrow the scope of study and set the subject. The selected studies are analyzed and classified based on their security goals (e.g., confidentiality, integrity, authentication), privacy-preserving techniques (e.g., anonymization, differential privacy, zero-knowledge proofs), blockchain configurations (e.g., public, private, consortium), and consensus mechanisms. The findings reveal a growing body of research applying blockchain to a wide range of IoT domains, addressing diverse application domains such as healthcare, smart homes, industrial IoT, and agriculture, and demonstrating its potential to enhance data integrity, access control, and authentication. However, the integration of blockchain in IoT also faces challenges such as scalability, latency, and resource overhead, especially in real-time and constrained environments. This review offers a comprehensive synthesis of the state-of-the-art, identifies current limitations and research gaps, and proposes future research directions for building secure, efficient, privacy-aware, and scalable blockchain-enabled IoT systems.