Blockchain-based Identity and Policy Management for Distributed Cloud Services

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Distributed cloud services across multiple providers demand consistent identity verification and policy enforcement. Centralized IAM and policy managers introduce single points of failure, limited auditability, and latency. We propose BC-IdPol, a blockchain-based framework that stores identities and governance policies on a permissioned ledger. Smart contracts enforce registration, authentication, and policy retrieval. Off-chain cloud agents query the chain for runtime decisions. In experiments over a three-cloud prototype (Azure, AWS, GCP) on Hyperledger Fabric, BC- IdPol achieved:  99.9 % tamper-resistance (vs. 0 % baseline)  45 ms median identity lookup latency (vs. 18 ms centralized API)  60 ms median policy fetch time (vs. 20 ms baseline)  1,800 req/sec enforcement throughput (vs. 2,200 req/sec) We detail architecture, smart-contract design, mermaid diagrams, evaluation results, limitations, and future work.