DL-BAC: Distributed Ledger Based Access Control for Web Applications

Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Nolan Shah, Zhimin Gao, Yang Lu, Weidong Shi

Abstract: Since Internet based applications have become the norm for most users, security has become a bigger concern than ever before, especially for applications like social networking and cloud based storage. Access control is one of the key techniques that can mitigate security concerns for web based applications. However, most existing access control mechanisms require a trusted party, which are vulnerable to many threats including malicious insiders and single point failure. In response to these challenges, we propose DL-BAC, a novel access control system based on the distributed ledger. DL-BAC robustly enforces access control policies without depending on a single trusted party. We also provide an extension of DL-BAC that is privacy respecting and evaluate the performance of DL-BAC to show its practicability.