DART: Towards a role-based trust management system on blockchain

Abstract

In the past years, trust management systems have been proven suitable for solving the authorization problem in distributed systems, such as peer to peer systems, social networks, cloud, mobile ad-hoc networks, and Internet of things. Trust management systems could be either managed by a central authority or decentralized. In both cases the entity or, respectively, the set of entities managing the system need to be trusted for all users. To overcome this limitation, this paper brings blockchain technology into trust management systems, proposing a novel implementation of the Role-based Trust management framework (RT) on blockchain. The approach relies on smart contracts to represent user trust networks and to infer new trust relations through the chain discovery algorithm. We evaluated a prototype implemented on Ethereum on a representative set of policies related to different scenarios.