Secure multi-factor access control mechanism for pairing blockchains

Abstract

Digitalization has made it easier for centric systems to transition from single-factor to two-factor authentication. However, several access control practices struggle to authenticate users correctly due to their weak and outdated authorization systems. Moreover, the majority of cloud-centric models suffer from security and single-point-of-failure issues. Consequently, several systems have migrated their access control services to the blockchain. A good illustration is using two-factor authentication techniques to increase transaction security in Bitcoin systems. However, with this holistic trend of 2FAs, multi-factor authentication has yet to see this trend. In this regard, the study proposes an access control technique that combines multiple factors of knowledge, inherent, and possession to authenticate users to the blockchain. The multiple factors derive a time-based access code for users to generate private keys. The efficiency of the proposed method is tested with a Py-Eth-pairing library to determine the computation cost and transmission overhead. Furthermore, we use the EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) library to assess the gas cost and determine the throughput. Our findings show the suggested approach to achieving the lowest operational cost, making it scalable on the blockchain while demonstrating its practicability through the model framework.