Towards Secure Distributed Trust Management on a Global Scale

Abstract

Authorization, and more generally Trust Management (TM), is an indispensable part of the correct operation of most IT systems. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), with its cyber-physical and distributed nature, creates new challenges, that existing TM systems cannot adequately address, such as for example the need for non-interactive exclusive access enforcement. In the meantime, a line of thought in the research community is that Distributed Ledgers (DLs), like the one implemented by the Ethereum blockchain, can provide strong security guarantees for distributed access control. However, this approach has not yet been examined in a scientific, systematic manner, and has many pitfalls, with arguably the most important one being scalability.