Authentication and Access Control based on Distributed Ledger Technology: A survey

Abstract

As the first step in preserving system security, Authentication and Access Control (AAC) plays a vital role in all businesses. Recently, emerging the blockchain and smart contract technology has attracted significant scientific interest in research areas like authentication and access control processes. In the context of authentication and access control, blockchain can offer greater data and rule confidentiality and integrity, as well as increasing the availability of the system by removing the single point of failure in the procedure. To categorize and find the most important open problems in this research area, having a comprehensive review is crucial. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time in this survey, we aim to describe the current state of the art in deploying blockchain and smart contracts specifically in authentication and access control. Following an introduction to AAC and blockchain technology, we present a brief background of distributed ledger technology, access control and authentication. To offer a clearer understanding of the state of the art, we propose taxonomy to categorize the existing methods based on their type, application environment and their justification for exploiting blockchain. For the conclusion of the paper, we examined the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed method in different contexts like security, resource consumption and privacy. Also we discussed about the future work.