An Automated Policy Verification and Enforcement Framework for Ethereum Applications

Abstract

In recent years, with the support of appropriate smart contract-based access control policies, blockchain technology has proven to be a compelling solution for providing a unified, trusted platform for resource sharing. However, due to the immutability property of blockchain, it can be challenging to patch or fix bugs after the deployment of a smart contract. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that the smart contract access control policies adhere to all specifications prior to their deployment, and the presence of anomalies within policies is not desirable. Thus, this paper proposes an automated policy verification and enforcement framework for Ethereum decentralized applications, which supports an automated off-chain policy verification before its deployment to the underlying blockchain. We integrate a verification engine within the off-chain module paired with a translator to convert XACML policies into Solidity smart contracts and vice-versa. Additionally, the experiments performed on benchmark XACML policies further reinforce the pragmatism of our proposal.