Decentralized Access Control Infrastructure using Blockchain for Big Data

Abstract

Big Data technology has demonstrated its effectiveness in several areas, and several projects confirm the existence of innovative opportunities. However, The security and privacy issues are gradually magnified in these environments. Traditional access control mechanisms cannot guarantee the user's anonymity and privacy. This article proposes a new access control infrastructure based on Blockchain technology for Big Data, to publish the policies, deployed in Smart contract, expressing the right to have access to a resource and provide the identification and authentication processes. In our infrastructure the policies are visible to the public, and any user can know the policy paired with a resource and who has the right to access, which compromises privacy. To deal with this problem, we encrypt the attributes in the access policy represented by the smart contract. We also encrypt the attributes in the access requester, and the verification is done solely on the basis of the comparison of encrypted attributes, whether they are identical or not. If so, an authorization token is generated to allow access.