Blockchain-based Access Control Research Articles

Blockchain based Decentralized Storage System

Abstract: This research introduces a novel decentralized storage system implemented through the integration of blockchain technology. The system is manifested in the form of a website developed using React.js, tailwindcss, and MySQL as the backend database, complemented by the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) for the secure storage of diverse document formats such as .pdf, .jpg, and .png. Users can securely manage their documents within their respective accounts on the platform. One of the primary features of the system is the ability for users to securely request access to specific documents from other users via the blockchain. This mechanism ensures a transparent and tamper-resistant transaction process, bolstering the security and integrity of document sharing. Additionally, users can seamlessly store their own documents within their personalized accounts, enhancing the platform's user-centric functionality. The utilization of React.js and tailwindcss ensures an interactive and visually appealing user interface, contributing to an enhanced user experience. The backend infrastructure, supported by MySQL, provides a robust and scalable foundation for efficient data management. This research contributes to the field by presenting a comprehensive solution that addresses the challenges associated with centralized storage systems. The decentralized architecture, coupled with blockchain-based access control, not only enhances security but also promotes transparency and accountability in document management.

A Block Chain-Based Access Control Framework with Privacy Protection in Cloud

Access control is a pivotal aspect of modern computing systems, ensuring that only authorized entities can interact with sensitive data and resources. Traditional access control methods, while effective, face challenges in terms of security, transparency, and scalability. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to enhance access control in cloud computing environments. Blockchain's inherent features, such as decentralization, immutability, and cryptographic security, offer a unique framework for addressing the limitations of traditional access control systems. In this paper, we explore the integration of blockchain technology with cloud computing to establish a more secure and transparent access control mechanism. By utilizing blockchain, access control policies and permissions can be stored in a tamper-proof and transparent ledger. Scalability is an issue since processing many access control transactions on the blockchain might cause network congestion and sluggish processing. Transactions take time to upload to the blockchain, which can delay real-time access choices. It takes skill to integrate and manage blockchain and cloud technologies together. Choosing the correct consensus mechanism affects system efficiency and security. Consider the costs of establishing and maintaining such a system and the difficulty of fixing faults owing to blockchain immutability. In conclusion, this paper underscores the significance of access control in cloud computing and the limitations of traditional approaches. By harnessing the power of blockchain technology, a more secure, transparent, and scalable access control framework can be established, revolutionizing the way we manage access to sensitive data and resources in complex digital ecosystems.

Efficient and Secure Blockchain-Based Access Control for Fog-Assisted IoT Cloud in Electronic Medical Records Sharing

Fog-assisted IoT Cloud environments have emerged as a result of the rapid spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the requirement for seamless data sharing in the healthcare industry. The effective and safe management of access control to sensitive data, such as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), becomes crucial in such configurations. The Efficient and Secure Blockchain-Based Access Control (ESBAC) framework, designed specifically for Fog-assisted IoT Cloud scenarios in EMR sharing, is our creative approach to this problem. The ESBAC architecture makes use of the blockchain's openness and immutability to provide reliable access control and auditability. The implementation of a consortium blockchain includes participants including healthcare providers, patients, and authorised entities. Each EMR has a smart contract attached to it that specifies access restrictions and permissions to make sure that only authorised parties are able to access and edit the data. Because of the decentralisation provided by the blockchain, security and privacy are improved because no single party has overwhelming control. Proposed framework uses attribute-based access control and lightweight encryption methods to provide a fair trade-off between security and efficiency. As a result, there can be fine-grained access control policies with the least amount of computing overhead. Comprehensive simulations are used to evaluate the suggested solution and compare it to current methods. The outcomes show that ESBAC improves security in EMR sharing and greatly lowers access latency.

Healthcare System Using Blockchain

The global Electronic Health Record (EHR) market is growing dramatically and is expected to reach $39.7 billion by 2022. To safeguard the security and privacy of EHR, access control is an essential mechanism for managing EHR data. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture to facilitate access control of EHR data by using both blockchain and edge nodes. Within the architecture, a blockchain-based controller manages identity and access control policies and serves as a tamper-proof log of access events. In addition, off-chain edge nodes store the EHR data and apply policies specified in Abbreviated Language For Authorization (ALFA) to enforce attribute-based access control on EHR data in collaboration with the blockchain-based access control logs. We evaluate the proposed hybrid architecture by utilizing the Hyperledger Composer Fabric blockchain to measure the performance of executing smart contracts and ACL policies in terms of transaction processing time and response time against unauthorized data retrieval. Keywords:Attribute-based Access Control, Access Control List, Blockchain, Edge Computing, Hyperledger, Smart Contract

Secure Sharing of Electronic Medical Records Based on Blockchain

As network technology advances and more people use devices, data storage has become a significant challenge due to the explosive growth of information and the threat of data leaks. In traditional medical institutions, most medical data is stored centrally through cloud computing technology in the institution’s data center. This centralized storage method has many security risks, and once the central server is attacked, it will lead to the loss of medical data, which will lead to the leakage of patients’ private data. At the same time, electronic medical records are the most critical data in the current medical field. In the traditional centralized healthcare service system (HSS), there are data leakage problems and tampering with electronic medical records due to human factors. At the same time, each hospital is built independently, resulting in the current centralized healthcare service system having a data silo problem, making it difficult to share medical data between institutions securely. With the increase in the number of users in the system, the electronic medical record data in the system also increases gradually, resulting in the increasing overhead of decryption calculation. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based access control scheme with multiparty authorization to ensure the security of electronic medical records. The scheme uses an SM encryption algorithm to encrypt the medical data in the system. It adds the patient’s signature to ensure the confidentiality and security of the data, and the encrypted electronic medical records (EMRs) are stored in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to realize the distributed storage of EMR. In addition, role-based multiauthorization access control is implemented through smart contract-based to ensure the security of EMR. We have analyzed the security of this paper’s solution and compared its performance with the existing schemes based on other cryptographic algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed solution significantly improves the secure sharing of EMR and provides system performance.

Combo-Chain: Towards a hierarchical attribute-based access control system for IoT with smart contract and sharding technique

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a collaborative environment among different entities (i.e., users, IoT devices, sensors, applications, etc.) to access resources. Despite the benefits that IoT technology brings to individuals, society, and industry, this technology faces a critical challenge in controlling access to various resources in IoT environments. To address this challenge, we propose Combo-Chain, an blockchain-based access control system deeply rooted in the concepts of the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model, smart contracts, and sharding. Combo-Chain introduces the concept of hierarchy for both subject attributes and object attributes to enhance flexibility and dynamicity when specifying ABAC policies, simplifying policy and attribute management. It not only manages access policies but also attributes by deploying a set of smart contracts. Furthermore, Combo-Chain utilizes sharding technique to distribute the overhead associated with storing and managing both access policies and attributes. Sharding also helps Combo-Chain to distribute the computational overhead when evaluating access requests among two groups of nodes, addressing the issues of low scalability and poor performance often associated with blockchain technology. Combo-Chain is implemented on a private Ethereum platform, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of Combo-Chain compared to existing blockchain-based access control systems.

Blockchain-based access control architecture for multi-domain environments

Numerous users from diverse domains access information and perform various operations in multi-domain environments. These users have complex permissions that increase the risk of identity falsification, unauthorized access, and privacy breaches during cross-domain interactions. Consequently, implementing an access control architecture to prevent users from engaging in illicit activities is imperative. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-based access control architecture for multi-domain environments. By integrating the multi-domain environment within a federated chain, the architecture utilizes Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) for user identification and relies on public/secret key pairs for operational execution. Verifiable credentials are used to authorize permissions and release resources, thereby ensuring authentication and preventing tampering and forgery. In addition, the architecture automates the authorization and access control processes through smart contracts, thereby eliminating human intervention. Finally, we performed a simulation evaluation of the architecture. The most time-consuming process had a runtime of 1074 ms, primarily attributed to interactions with the blockchain. Concurrent testing revealed that with a concurrency level of 2000 demonstrated that the response times for read and write operations were maintained within 1000 ms and 4600 ms, respectively. In terms of storage efficiency, except for user registration, which incurred two gas charges, all the other processes required only one charge.

A Blockchain-Based Access Control Scheme for Reputation Value Attributes of the Internet of Things

A Blockchain-Based Access Control Scheme for Reputation Value Attributes of the Internet of Things

SanIdea: Exploiting Secure Blockchain-Based Access Control via Sanitizable Encryption

SanIdea: Exploiting Secure Blockchain-Based Access Control via Sanitizable Encryption

IoT security with blockchain: A review

The relationship between the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain has emerged to address the challenges of security, data integrity and transparency of IoT devices. Blockchain, with its distributed and decentralized nature, ensures reliable data transmission between IoT devices and security by preventing data manipulation. It also enhances the security and transparency of IoT applications by supporting automated and trusted transactions through smart contracts. In this context, Blockchain plays a critical role in making the IoT ecosystem more reliable and effective. In this study, we review studies that emphasize the importance of Blockchain technology for IoT security and propose various solutions. The proposed solutions include scalable frameworks for secure transactions in dynamic applications, Hyperledger Sawtooth-based frameworks that support secure logging of industrial activities, specialized access control mechanisms such as Trust-Based Access Control Mechanism (TABI), and IoT Cop monitoring framework that offers advanced security features. In addition, blockchain-based access control protocols, authentication systems and security models are aimed at enhancing IoT security. While most of the studies in the literature focus on the current challenges of IoT and Blockchain integration, they also reveal future research opportunities. These studies are briefly mentioned and the necessary ones are expressed in a table. In this way, it is aimed to create the necessary infrastructure for those who will work in this field.

Advancements in Cloud Security: An Enhanced Auth Privacy Chain-Based Hybrid Encryption Technique for Scalability

Security remains a top priority in the ever-changing landscape of cloud computing. This in-depth examination examines the most recent breakthroughs in cloud security, with a particular emphasis on an emerging paradigm An Enhanced AuthPrivacyChain-Based Hybrid Encryption Technique. This study seeks to provide a detailed knowledge and critical analysis of the current status of safe cloud computing, tackling the critical challenge of scalability by drawing insights from an extensive collection of over 50 relevant research papers.
 By introducing a novel hybrid encryption model, the suggested technique extends the AuthPrivacyChain framework, a blockchain-based access control system. This paradigm intentionally blends the features of symmetric and asymmetric encryption, leveraging their distinct characteristics to strengthen cloud data security. The key goals are to achieve fine-grained access control, prevent illegal access, and ensure that encrypted data is handled efficiently in cloud environments.
 The review highlights the importance of attribute-based encryption, homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation in reinforcing the security of cloud-stored data based on an evaluation of the selected references. The AuthPrivacyChain framework introduces an additional layer of security through blockchain, ensuring robust privacy protection and accountability in cloud transactions. Moreover, the hybrid encryption model effectively addresses the limitations associated with traditional encryption schemes, offering a judicious balance between security and performance.
 A central theme throughout the reviewed literature is the emphasis on scalability enhancement. The proposed technique demonstrates promising capabilities to meet the escalating demands of cloud computing environments, accommodating the burgeoning volume and intricacy of data while upholding stringent security measures.
 This review paper serves as an invaluable resource for researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers immersed in the realm of cloud security. By synthesizing insights from a diverse array of sources, it not only contributes to the ongoing discourse on securing cloud data but also lays the groundwork for future advancements in the field, fostering innovation and resilience in the face of evolving cybersecurity challenges.

Mitigating Risks in the Cloud-Based Metaverse Access Control Strategies and Techniques

The advent of the metaverse has revolutionized virtual interactions and navigation, introducing intricate access control challenges. This paper addresses the need for effective access control models in the cloud-based metaverse. It explores its distinct characteristics, including its dynamic nature, diverse user base, and shared spaces, highlighting privacy concerns and legal implications. The paper analyzes access control principles specific to the cloud-based metaverse, emphasizing least privilege, separation of duties, RBAC, defense-in-depth, and auditability/accountability. It delves into identity verification and authorization methods, such as biometrics, multi-factor authentication, and role-based/attribute-based authorization. Advanced access control technologies for the cloud-based metaverse are examined, including SSO solutions, blockchain-based access control, ABAC, adaptive access control, and VMI for isolation. Risk mitigation strategies encompass IDS/IPS, SIEM, and user education programs.

Blockchain-based access control system for efficient and GDPR-compliant personal data management

New digital technologies generate large amounts of information. This data is processed by Service Providers in order to improve and develop new services and products, but also to fund themselves. However, processing personal data may result in the extraction of sensitive information, which, in turn, may lead to jeopardizing the users’ privacy. To mitigate this significant risk, the European Parliament and Council of the European Union elaborated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation forces Service Providers to obtain Data Subjects’ explicit consent prior to collecting and processing their personal data. Nevertheless, the GDPR’s legislative text does not define how Service Providers must transparently demonstrate that they already have these consents. Moreover, most individuals do not know the rights they have over their personal data, neither does this regulation provide them with efficient methods to be aware of what third parties are doing with such data. In order to address this situation, we propose a lightweight blockchain-based GDPR-compliant personal data management platform. The new solution provides public access to immutable evidences that reflect the reached agreements between Data Subjects and Service Providers. In this way, Service Providers can effectively demonstrate that they are fulfilling the regulation, and Data Subjects are able to control and manage their personal data according to their legitimate rights. We have implemented the new system, and we have performed a detailed study which includes: GDPR-compliance, provided functionality, security and privacy issues, and the cost in terms of gas and US dollars of the different operations to be run on the blockchain.

MSLShard: An efficient sharding-based trust management framework for blockchain-empowered IoT access control

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely used in modern smart areas such as smart cities, but data security remains a significant challenge. Blockchain-based IoT access control addresses data security issues by preventing unauthorized devices from accessing limited IoT resources. However, most existing blockchain-based access control schemes still have scalability and security issues. A lightweight and secure framework, MSLShard, is proposed for the blockchain-based access control via sharding, which consists of two parts. First, an adaptive network sharding scheme based on network distance, node credibility, and access frequency is designed in the cloud-edge-end collaboration-based IoT architecture to reduce nodes' storage pressure and improve the scheme's scalability. Second, the trust management based on multidimensional subjective logic explicitly portrays the heterogeneity among edge nodes to motivate cooperation and further improve the security of the blockchain. Experimental results show that MSLShard can achieve high scalability and security in large-scale IoT environments compared to existing methods.

N-Accesses: A Blockchain-Based Access Control Framework for Secure IoT Data Management.

With the rapid advancement of network communication and big data technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has permeated every facet of our lives. Meanwhile, the interconnected IoT devices have generated a substantial volume of data, which possess both economic and strategic value. However, owing to the inherently open nature of IoT environments and the limited capabilities and the distributed deployment of IoT devices, traditional access control methods fall short in addressing the challenges of secure IoT data management. On the one hand, the single point of failure issue is inevitable for the centralized access control schemes. On the other hand, most decentralized access control schemes still face problems such as token underutilization, the insecure distribution of user permissions, and inefficiency.This paper introduces a blockchain-based access control framework to address these challenges. Specifically, the proposed framework enables data owners to host their data and achieves user-defined lightweight data management. Additionally, through the strategic amalgamation of smart contracts and hash-chains, our access control scheme can limit the number of times (i.e., n-times access) a user can access the IoT data before the deadline. This also means that users can utilize their tokens multiple times (predefined by the data owner) within the deadline, thereby improving token utilization while ensuring strict access control. Furthermore, by leveraging the intrinsic characteristics of blockchain, our framework allows data owners to gain capabilities for auditing the access records of their data and verifying them. To empirically validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework and approach, we conducted extensive simulations, and the experimental results demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of our solution.

Massive Data Connection Architecture Design of Web Platform Based on Blockchain

In order to improve the universality and security of the data management of the Internet of Things and avoid the single point of failure problem in the traditional management architecture, this paper proposes a massive connection management architecture based on blockchain. The blockchain is reconstructed according to the hierarchical structure of blockchain technology, and with reference to the attribute-based access control mechanism, a data exchange model is designed using gossip mode and TLS networking mode to ensure the safe transmission of data. The peer computer network technology, data signature, and consensus mechanism are used to complete the design of the data exchange network layer and realize the design of the blockchain-based massive connection management architecture, so as to effectively avoid the single point of failure problem in the traditional management architecture and greatly reduce the burden of the management center. The access requests of massive devices in 5G application scenarios were simulated, and the results showed that the blockchain-based access control architecture designed in this article can quickly process received requests, with information leakage below 10%, improving the security and processing performance of data connections, achieving efficient processing and management of large-scale data, and providing reliable guarantees for the development of the Internet era.

A Blockchain-Based Access Control Scheme for Zero Trust Cross-Organizational Data Sharing

Multi-organization data sharing is becoming increasingly prevalent due to the interconnectivity of systems and the need for collaboration across organizations (e.g., exchange of data in a supply chain involving multiple upstream and downstream vendors). There are, however, data security concerns due to lack of trust between organizations that may be located in jurisdictions with varying security and privacy legislation and culture (also referred to as a zero trust environment). Hence, in such a zero trust setting, one should introduce strengthened, yet efficient, access control mechanisms to facilitate cross-organizational data access and exchange requests. Contemporary access control schemes generally focus on protecting a single objective rather than multiple parties, due to higher security costs. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based access control scheme, designed to facilitate lightweight data sharing among different organizations. Specifically, our approach utilizes the consortium blockchain to establish a trustworthy environment, in which a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model is then deployed using our proposed multi-signature protocol and smart contract methods. Evaluation of our proposed approach is performed on the HyperLedger Fabric consortium blockchain platform using both Caliper and BFT-SMaRT benchmarks, and the findings demonstrate the utility of our approach.

Enhancing Academic Certificate Privacy with a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain-Based Access Control Approach

Enhancing Academic Certificate Privacy with a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain-Based Access Control Approach

Blockchain-Based Access and Timeliness Control for Administrative Punishment Market Supervision

Administrative punishment is one of the most important ways of enforcing administrative law in the field of market supervision in China. However, at the current stage, the abuse of data access permission and the difficulty in managing timeliness in administrative punishment still remain unresolved, which hinders the legalization and standardization of the administrative punishment system. Inspired by blockchain, which is inherently traceable, tamper-proof, and transparent, we design a system, punishment supervisor (PEATS), which is suitable for administrative punishment and technically overcomes the defects of the traditional administrative punishment procedure. To prevent the abuse of data access permission, we innovatively introduce the ACG (authorization control gateway) to verify the access permission of users based on the records in the MSD (market supervision department) contract. To ensure the timeliness of the administrative punishment procedure, we design a special case contract that has the same status as the general case processing state of administrative punishment to track case progress on the blockchain. We experiment and evaluate PEATS in terms of functionality and performance and find that PEATS provides traceability, transparency, and timeliness assurance. In addition, PEATS has 80.9% of the throughput of a traditional server with no more than an additional 3% latency and at most 60 KB additional storage space per case.

BLA2C2: Design of a Novel Blockchain-based Light-Weight Authentication & Access Control Layer for Cloud Deployments

Cloud deployments are consistently under attack, from both internal and external adversaries. These attacks include, but are not limited to brute force, masquerading, improper access, session hijacking, cross site scripting (XSS), etc. To mitigate these attacks, a wide variety of authentication & access control models are proposed by researchers, and each of them vary in terms of their internal implementation characteristics. It was observed that these models are either highly complex, or lack in terms of security under multiple attacks, which limits their applicability for real-time deployments. Moreover, some of these models are not flexible and cannot be deployed under dynamic cloud scenarios (like constant reconfigurations of Virtual Machines, dynamic authentication use-cases, etc.). To overcome these issues, this text proposes design of a novel blockchain-based Light-weight authentication & access control layer that can be used for dynamic cloud deployments. The proposed model initially applies a header-level light-weight sanitization layer that removes Cross Site Scripting, SQL Injection, and other data-level attacks. This is followed by a light-weight authentication layer, that assists in improving login-level security for external attacks. The authentication layer uses IP matching with reverse geolocation mapping in order to estimate outlier login attempts. This layer is cascaded with an efficient blockchain-based access control model, which assists in mitigating session hijacking, masquerading, sybil and other control-level attacks. The blockchain model is developed via integration of Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) to reduce unnecessary complexities, and provides faster response when compared with existing blockchain-based security deployments. Efficiency of the model was estimated in terms of accuracy of detection for different attack types, delay needed for detection of these attacks, and computational complexity during attack mitigation operations. This performance was compared with existing models, and it was observed that the proposed model showcases 8.3% higher accuracy, with 10.5% lower delay, and 5.9% lower complexity w.r.t. standard blockchain-based & other security models. Due to these enhancements, the proposed model was capable of deployment for a wide variety of large-scale scenarios.