Blockchain Based Access Control

By Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Paolo Mori, Laura Ricci. IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, 2017

315 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Access Control systems are used in computer security to regulate the access to critical or valuable resources. The rights of subjects to access such resources are typically expressed through access control policies, which are evaluated at access request time against the current access context. This paper proposes a new approach based on blockchain technology to publish the policies expressing the right to access a resource and to allow the distributed transfer of such right among users. In our proposed protocol the policies and the rights exchanges are publicly visible on the blockchain, consequently any user can know at any time the policy paired with a resource and the subjects who currently have the rights to access the resource. This solution allows distributed auditability, preventing a party from fraudulently denying the rights granted by an enforceable policy. We also show a possible working implementation based on XACML policies, deployed on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d50b93c207470f26437a1be37369b6fc686fea2

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain 3.0 applications survey (2020, background): “…used to store Access Control policies, access requests (issued by the subjects who want to access the resources) and the related results (access permitted/access denied), as well as for executing the access decision process, i.e., to evaluate the relevant policies against the access requests [96].”
Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things (2018, methodology): “The idea of using the blockchain to only store access control policies has also been adopted in [27] and [28].”
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA): A Comprehensive Survey (2022, background): “Authors in [88] proposed leveraging blockchain for publishing the access polices corresponding to a resource and for distributed transfer of access rights amongst the users.”
A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues (2019, unknown): “Therefore, privacy and security oriented applications that rely on blockchain technology can be found in the literature (Di Francesco Maesa et al., 2017; Dorri et al., 2017c; Hari and Lakshman, 2016; Lee et al., 2017; Tang et al., 2018; Chanson et al., 2017; Anjum et al., 2017).”