A Hybrid PoS–PoW Blockchain Framework for Secure Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Abstract

Many blockchain-based cyber threat intelligence (CTI) sharing systems emphasize immutability and auditability, but often treat CTI submissions as ordinary blockchain transactions without explicitly separating content validation from publication anchoring. This paper presents CTIB, a proof-of-concept hybrid Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-Work (PoW) framework for CTI publication. CTIB uses a sequential workflow in which a PoS committee first evaluates CTI submissions, and an accepted feed hash is then anchored through a PoW step to provide verifiable temporal binding. The prototype is evaluated in a controlled local Hardhat environment; therefore, the results should be interpreted as prototype-level feasibility evidence rather than production-scale deployment results. CTI content is represented using STIX 2.1, canonicalized, and hashed using SHA-256; only integrity-critical evidence is stored on-chain, while full CTI content remains off-chain. Experimental results demonstrate prototype-level feasibility, with measured throughput, latency, and success rate metrics under different PoW difficulty profiles. Across ten independent local runs, CTIB achieved an average throughput between 141.13 and 166.14 feeds/min, average p50 latency between 326.18 and 403.09 ms, and average p95 latency between 553.22 and 700.82 ms under the tested difficulty profiles. Security analysis uses analytical modeling, committee capture probability, and Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate majority-attack feasibility under stated assumptions. The results indicate that sequential compromise of both validation and anchoring layers increases the cost of coordinated manipulation.