Poster: Towards Fully Distributed User Authentication with Blockchain

Abstract

User authentication in computer systems has been a cornerstone of computer security for decades. However, the existing user authentication schemes either require human cognitive ability to remember numerous complex id and password, or rely on a trusted third party which could fail due to technical failure or denial-of-service attacks. In this paper, we design a fully distributed user authentication framework with the blockchain technology. In our scheme, a user stores her identity in the blockchain, stores her encrypted personal information in a off-blockchain storage, and attaches a smart contract which grants different permissions to each website/application. When a user logs in a website/application, the service provider employs a challenge-response protocol to verify the identity of the user, and then retrieve the user's personal information from the off-blockchain storage.