Attribute Based Access Control for Cloud Resources using Smart Contracts

Abstract

Accessing clo!ud resources requires critical security controls as there will be tracking of all the access attempts made by the users to access the resources from the system both legitimate as well as illegal. Traditional cloud-based systems are centralized and dependent on a single third party. This results in single-point failure and lacks data access control and privacy. Blockchain facilitates decentralized data management. Blockchain specifically allows construction of access control methods by using smart contract. To provide reliable and secure access control, we propose a decentralized system whose access is based on the attributes of the user with the help of a smart contract. Attribute-based access control allows subject and object attributes to be included in authorization decisions. Policies for each user are defined. The user’s attributes have to match with the policies in order to access the resources. It also authenticates end users requesting access to cloud resources. The performance evaluation of the proposed access control mechanism is carried out using Ethereum blockchain platform in terms of transaction latency, gas consumption and false positive rate.