Blockchain-inspired architectures for attribute-based access control and zero knowledge proof-based data privacy
Date
2020
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger which can record transactions between different parties in a persistent and verifiable manner. As a distributed ledger, blockchain reduces the costs involved in verifying transactions, and by removing the need for the trusted “third-parties” such as central authority to complete transactions and other operations. From the original Bitcoin architecture, people find that blockchain-inspired applications can be expanded beyond the cryptocurrencies and financial-related fields with inherent decentralized characteristic. The invention of smart contract leads to the development of more varied applications such as IoT security and privacy, information sharing and management, and access control of e-health data. ☐ In this dissertation, we address the following problems and focus on several specific scenarios to illustrate our proposed blockchain-inspired solutions. In our first paper, we address the autonomous vehicles’ accident forensics problems. Inspired by the blockchain specific characteristics such as durability, immutability, audibility, and reliability, we proposed the blockchain-inspired event recording system for autonomous vehicles with proof-of-event with dynamic federation and fast leader election algorithm design. In our second and third papers, we focus on the integration with attribute-based access control policy with blockchain-inspired architecture. In the traditional access control system, usually it has a centralized controller which suffers from the single point of failure and risk of data privacy leakage issues. We proposed the multiauthority attribute-based access control schemes by imposing Ethereum’s smart contract to enable the functionality to achieve our goals. In the third paper, we proposed the access control scheme for electronic health records with hybrid blockchain-edge architecture. This work presents a hybrid architecture to facilitate attribute-based access control policy of EHR data by utilizing both on-chain Hyperledger blockchain network and off-chain edge node. ☐ To address the data security and privacy issue, especially, how sensitive data is shared on blockchain and how to keep the authenticity and confidentiality of data feed into smart contract? We leverage the Zero Knowledge Proof technology atop the Blockchain to address the above issue. We propose a blockchain and Zero-knowledge Proof inspired approach to provide the privacy-preserving traffic management scheme. We design a decentralized and location-aware architecture to address the data integrity along with the privacy-preserving issues in a scenario of multiple traffic networks. Our proposed architecture integrates with permissioned and modular blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric and non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Range Proof protocols. We also investigate the performance of the architecture through an extensive simulation study. ☐ To safeguard the security of EHR data and privacy of patients, fine-grained information access and sharing mechanisms are essential for EHR management. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture of blockchain and edge nodes to facilitate EHR management. In this architecture, we utilize attribute-based multi-signature (ABMS) scheme to authenticate user’s signatures without revealing the sensitive information and multi-authority attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to encrypt EHR data which is stored on the edge node. We develop the blockchain module on Hyperledger Fabric platform and the ABMS module on Hyperledger Ursa library. We measure the signing and verifying time of the ABMS scheme under different settings, and experiment with the authentication events and access activities which are logged as transactions in blockchain.
Description
Keywords
Attribute-based access control, Blockchain, Data privacy, Hyperledger fabric, Zero-knowledge proof