Incentive-Driven Access Control Framework with Smart Contracts for Secure P2P Networks

Abstract

Access control in P2P network is extremely challenging due to several reasons such as decentrailized network, anonymous connectivity, high churn, resource constraints and large attack surface. The number of attributes to be tracked grows exponentially as P2P networks scale, exacerbating issues in traditional approaches such as RBAC, ABAC, RuBAC. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based access control framework for P2P networks using Ethereum smart contracts to offer an adaptable, decentralized, and scalable solution. Our token economy framework incentivizes nodes that demonstrate consistent compliance and penalize malicious actions using fungible ERC-20 tokens. Hierarchical static role-based structure consisting of regular members, primary and secondary group is the foundational layer of role management. Dynamic state management through a finite state machine classifies peers as benign, suspicious, or malicious mapping their behavior to the STRIDE threat model. We have used standard blockchain tool stack consisting of OpenZeppelin (contract library), Mocha (testing), and Web3.js (deployment). Our framework is tested with eight test cases, such as privilege escalation and denial-of-service attacks, and built using three types of Ethereum smart contracts. Our focus is on collecting four metrics gas cost, latency, execution time, simultaneous requests that provides a comprehensive view of realistic network activity. This study goes beyond conceptual nature of state-of-art architecture to showcase the realistic mapping between resources, peer roles and standard threats in a P2P network. The experimental results shows low gas costs (upto 1.4 million gas) and fast execution times (80–550 ms), confirming the design efficiency. The framework handles up to five concurrent requests with minimal performance impact, demonstrating strong scalability across roles and threat conditions. This framework enables scalable, behavior-driven governance in P2P networks, enhancing IoT and Web3 security.