Trust issues in power equipment metadata sharing based on smart contracts and distributed storage technology

The extensive deployment of the Power Internet of Things (PIoT) introduces a critical challenge: ensuring trustworthy metadata sharing among heterogeneous devices. Traditional centralized architectures are inherently susceptible to single-point failures and data tampering, and they lack automated mechanisms for establishing trust across different domains. To address these issues, this paper proposes a hybrid framework that integrates Smart Contracts (SCs) and Distributed Storage Technology (DST). In this paradigm, SCs are deployed on the blockchain to manage access control and hash-based verification, while the raw metadata itself is shard-stored in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), forming an "on-chain verification + off-chain storage" model. Furthermore, a bidirectional dynamic trust sensing model is designed for Smart Devices (SDs) and Edge Servers (ESs). Unlike static reputation accumulation, this model enables trust states to evolve dynamically by analyzing sequences of real-time interaction behaviors. Experimental evaluations, conducted on a testbed combining public power datasets with simulated data, demonstrate that under the defined test conditions, the trust evaluation accuracy approaches 100% (95% confidence interval: [99.97%, 100%]). The proposed framework reduces task response latency to 30–50 ms, representing a three- to four-fold improvement over conventional Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree) solutions. It also shortens failure recovery time to less than one second—a 300- to 600-fold enhancement—lowers computational overhead by approximately 50%, and achieves a metadata association accuracy of 0.99. This research provides a tamper-resistant technical pathway for the digital transformation of power grids, enabling transparent and secure data exchange within PIoT environments.