Blockchain‐based access control with k $k$‐times tamper resistance in cloud environment

Abstract

While cloud computing services such as cloud storage are fairly mature, it remains challenging to design efficient and secure cryptographic schemes to facilitate fine-grained access control and achieve other features. For example, existing ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption schemes do not generally have in-place limits on the number of access or access duration, which can consequently be exploited to perform economic denial of sustainability and other attacks. In addition, improving system efficiency can be challenging in large-scale operations. Thus, in this paper, we present a blockchain-based access control with k $k$ -times tamper resistance. Our proposed approach allows one to set and enforce quota/limits on the number of accesses allowed for each user, whose integrity is ensured using blockchain. In addition, our proposed approach also allows multiple attribute authorities to coexist and work together with a central authority to facilitate secret key distribution and improve system efficiency. We then evaluate the security and the efficiency of our proposed approach to demonstrate its utility.