Analyzing the Role of Blockchain in Enhancing Cybersecurity Infrastructure: A Comparative Study of Traditional and Decentralized Systems

Abstract

Digital inflow of infrastructures has made certain, stable, and non-porous security systems more urgent and crucial. Although traditional centralized logging and monitoring systems are not only efficient in their speed and resource usage, but also susceptible to colossal and insider attacks. This paper explains how blockchain technology contribute to the improvement of the cybersecurity infrastructure with the help of a comparative analysis of the centralized and decentralized logging systems. The two systems were compared using 600,000 artificial log entries of 30 controlled experiments on measures like integrity detection, latency, throughput, resource usage, and resilience to adversarial environments, including replay and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The results showed that the blockchain systems detected tampering 100 % and replay 0 % and 44 % resilience to DDoS conditions compared to the centralized system which only detected 5 % of tampered logs and failed in 87 % of replay attacks. However, blockchain integration incurred significantly greater computational cost, and the latency was nearly 30-fold; the usage of resources was over 200 % higher than centralized systems. These findings highlight the trade-off between efficiency and security, whereby blockchain is more efficient in terms of integrity and resiliency guarantees at the cost of performance. This paper ends by concluding that blockchain-based cybersecurity infrastructures possess a large potential in high-risk and mission-critical environments where the integrity and trust of data are the most relevant aspects.