BCredS: Blockchain Leveraged Secure System for Credential Management in Emergency Scenarios

Abstract

Credential management for emergency scenarios is vital for security, access control, accountability, and ensuring the effectiveness of response and recovery efforts while adhering to regulatory requirements. In the aftermath of a disaster or any emergency scenario, control stations/regulatory authorities access several response and recovery systems for providing services. Unauthorized access to these systems creates cyber-attacks. Also, the existing credentials management systems suffer from time-consuming procedures due to the involvement of numerous stakeholders and restricted information access, leading to increased administrative burden, and loss of trust and reputation in the system. As a result, several researchers and emergency response organizations have advised to use of blockchain technology which provides a secure, transparent, and tamper-proof ledger of credentials and access logs. This immutability ensures that no unauthorized changes or deletions occur, enhancing the trustworthiness of the credential data. Hence, this work exploits the concept of blockchain to enrich the credential management system by streamlining the validation mechanism and upgrading security mechanisms. This work develops BCredS, a blockchain-leveraged secure and intelligent credential management system by designing smart contracts that are resistant to hacking, and by utilizing blockchain, the security of the application will be improved since it employs strong cryptographic techniques. The efficiency of the proposed work will be evaluated through extensive simulation in Ethereum platform.