On the Blockchain-Based General-Purpose Public Key Infrastructure

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed unprecedented advancements in the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain - a form of DLT. DLT has clearly expanded the applications landscape in various sectors of our lives ranging from banking to business, finance, industry, education, and so on. On the other hand, security plays a crucial part in the successful realization of such applications and services. To this end, cryptography is the primary mean to protect the applications, networks, infrastructure, and services from cyber-threats. However, the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is based on central Certificate Authority (CA) that can become a bottleneck and may affect the efficiency of the cryptographic protocols because of the overhead incurred by the verification of cryptographic signatures and certificates. Recently, blockchain has also been leveraged to aid PKI without the need for a central authority. In this spirit, in this paper, we develop and implement a blockchain-based PKI using open-source Hyperledger Sawtooth. The proposed blockchain-based approach helps to address the problems of the existing PKI such as compromised and misbehaving CAs.