Access control management is an integral part of maintaining the security of an application. Although there has been significant work in the field of cloud access control mechanisms, however, with the advent of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), on-chain access control management frameworks hardly exist. Existing access control management mechanisms are tightly coupled with the business logic, resulting in governance issues, non-coherent with existing Identity Management Solutions, low security, and compromised usability. We propose a novel framework to implement dynamic role-based access control for decentralized applications (dApps). The framework allows for managing access control on a dApp, which is completely decoupled from the business application and integrates seamlessly with any dApps. The smart contract architecture allows for the independent management of business logic and execution of access control policies. It also facilitates secure, low cost, and a high degree of flexibility of access control management. The proposed framework promotes decentralized governance of access control policies and efficient smart contract upgrades. We also provide quantitative and qualitative metrics for the efficacy and efficiency of the framework. Any Turing complete smart contract programming language is an excellent fit to implement the framework. We expect this framework to benefit enterprise and non-enterprise dApps and provide greater access control flexibility and effective integration with traditional and state of the art identity management solutions.
We present a mechanism that puts users in the center of control and empowers them to dictate the access to their collections of data. Revisiting the fundamental mechanisms in security for providing protection, our solution uses capabilities, access lists, and access rights following well-understood formal notions for reasoning about access. This contribution presents a practical, correct, auditable, transparent, distributed, and decentralized mechanism that is well-matched to the current emerging environments including Internet of Things, smart city, precision medicine, and autonomous cars. It…
This paper presents Droplet, a decentralized data access control service. Droplet enables data owners to securely and selectively share their encrypted data while guaranteeing data confidentiality in the presence of unauthorized parties and compromised data servers. Droplet's contribution lies in coupling two key ideas: (i) a cryptographically-enforced access control construction for encrypted data streams which enables users to define fine-grained stream-specific access policies, and (ii) a decentralized authorization service that serves user-defined access policies. In this paper, we present…
Large commercial buildings are complex cyber-physical systems containing expensive and critical equipment that ensure the safety and comfort of their numerous occupants. Yet occupant and visitor access to spaces and equipment within these buildings are still managed through unsystematic, inefficient, and human-intensive processes. As a standard practice, long-term building occupants are given access privileges to rooms and equipment based on their organizational roles, while visitors have to be escorted by their hosts. This approach is conservative and inflexible. In this paper, we describe a …
The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoTs) allows heterogeneous embedded smart devices to collaboratively provide smart services with or without human intervention. While leveraging the large scale IoT based applications like Smart Gird or Smart Cities, IoTs also incur more concerns on privacy and security. Among the top security challenges that IoTs face, access authorization is critical in resource sharing and information protection. One of the weaknesses in today's access control (AC) is the centralized authorization server, which can be the performance bottleneck or the single point of fa…
Radio Access Network faces challenges from privacy and flexible wide area and local area network access. RAN is limited from providing local service directly due to centralized design of cellular network and concerns of user privacy and data security. DecentRAN or Decentralized Radio Access Network offers an alternative perspective to cope with the emerging demands of 5G Non-public Network and the hybrid deployment of 5GS and Wi-Fi in the campus network. Starting from Public key as an Identity, independent mutual authentication between UE and RAN are made possible in a privacy-preserving manne…
Heterogeneous and dynamic IoT environments require a lightweight, scalable, and trustworthy access control system for protection from unauthorized access and for automated detection of compromised nodes. Recent proposals in IoT access control systems have incorporated blockchain to overcome inherent issues in conventional access control schemes. However, the dynamic interaction of IoT networks remains uncaptured. Here, we develop a blockchain based Trust and Reputation System (TRS) for IoT access control, which progressively evaluates and calculates the trust and reputation score of each parti…
We design and implement Publication Chain (PubChain), a decentralized open-access publication platform built on decentralized and distributed technologies of blockchain and IPFS peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The existing publication platforms have some severe drawbacks. First, instead of promoting widespread knowledge sharing, access to publications on the platforms owned by publishers is often on a fee basis. This drawback of pay wall prevents researchers from "standing on the shoulders of giants". Moreover, the peer review process on most all existing publication platforms (including bo…
Access control models have been developed to control authorized access to sensitive resources. This control of access is important as there is now a need for collaborative resource sharing between multiple organizations over open environments like the internet. Although there are multiple access control models that are being widely used, these models are providing access control within a closed environment i.e. within the organization using it. These models have restricted capabilities in providing access control in open environments. Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) has emerged as a powe…
NuCypher KMS is a decentralized Key Management System (KMS) that addresses the limitations of using consensus networks to securely store and manipulate private, encrypted data. It provides encryption and cryptographic access controls, performed by a decentralized network, leveraging proxy re-encryption. Unlike centralized KMS as a service solutions, it doesn't require trusting a service provider. NuCypher KMS enables sharing of sensitive data for both decentralized and centralized applications, providing security infrastructure for applications from healthcare to identity management to decentr…
The Internet of Things (IoT) bears unprecedented security and scalability challenges due to the magnitude of data produced and exchanged by IoT devices and platforms. Some of those challenges are currently being addressed by coupling IoT applications with blockchains. However, current blockchain-backed IoT systems simply use the blockchain to store access control policies, thereby underutilizing the power of blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a new framework named Sash that couples IoT platforms with blockchain that provides a number of advantages compared to state of the art. In…
Space situation awareness (SSA) includes tracking of active and inactive resident space objects (RSOs) and assessing the space environment through sensor data collection and processing. To enhance SSA, the dynamic data-driven applications systems (DDDAS) framework couples on-line data with off-line models to enhance system performance. Using feedback control, sensor management, and communications reliability. For information management, there is a need for identity authentication and access control to ensure the integrity of exchanged data as well as to grant authorized entities access right t…
Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a new arising terminology of network architecture with outstanding features of orchestration by decoupling the control plane and the data plane in each network element. Even though it brings several benefits, SDN is vulnerable to a diversity of attacks. Abusing the single point of failure in the SDN controller component, hackers can shut down all network operations. More specifics, a malicious OpenFlow application can access to SDN controller to carry out harmful actions without any limitation owing to the lack of the access control mechanism as a standard in …
Decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges offer compelling security benefits over centralized exchanges: users control their funds and avoid the risk of an exchange hack or malicious operator. However, because user assets are fully accessible by a secret key, decentralized exchanges pose significant internal security risks for trading firms and automated trading systems, where a compromised system can result in total loss of funds. Centralized exchanges mitigate this risk through API key based security policies that allow professional users to give individual traders or automated systems specific…
Sensitive records stored in the cloud such as healthcare records, private conversation and credit card information are targets of hackers and privacy abuse. Current information and record management systems have difficulties achieving privacy protection of such sensitive records in a secure, transparent, decentralized and trustless environment. The Blockchain technology is a nascent and a promising technology that facilitates data sharing and access in a secure, decentralized and trustless environment. The technology enables the use of smart contracts that can be leveraged to complement existi…
Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows …
The public blockchain was originally conceived to process monetary transactions in a peer-to-peer network while preventing double-spending. It has since been extended to numerous other applications including execution of programs that exist on the blockchain called "smart contracts." Smart contracts have a major limitation, namely they only operate on data that is on the blockchain. Trusted entities called oracles attest to external data in order to bring it onto the blockchain but they do so without the robust security guarantees that blockchains generally provide. This has the potential to t…
The challenge to establish and verify human identity over the Internet in a secure and privacy-respecting way is long-standing. In this paper, we explore the blockchain trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization in the context of the Trust Registry: a root of trust for a decentralized identity scheme that enables read and write access to shared records and is tamper-resistant. We make a case study of Hyperledger Indy -- an open-source technology bespoke for decentralized identity -- and conduct two empirical experiments to measure the latency of more than 45,000 transactions in th…
