Combining Multiple ID’s, Attributes, and Policies to Provide Secure Access Control within Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Networks

Abstract

Blockchain technologies allow users to securely store and trace their data on a fully decentralized system, and have the potential to make a huge impact on many industries. While traditional, permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano are very popular, they are currently unable to provide trust and privacy on the network. To solve these issues, many new, permissioned blockchain technologies have been implemented, including Hyperledger Fabric. Although Hyperledger Fabric has proven to be highly successful in providing trust and privacy through the use of identities, channels, and private data collections, one of its major drawbacks is the lack of a flexible and scalable access control system. Currently, access control decisions have to be built into each smart contract individually, which can cause many vulnerabilities and prevent access policies to be updated dynamically.

This research aims to answer the research question “How can secure access control in Hyperledger Fabric be guaranteed by combining multiple ID’s, attributes, and policies with the components that regulate access control?”. To answer this question, the access control system currently used by Hyperledger Fabric is first completely analyzed. Next, a new implementation is proposed that builds upon the existing solution but provides users and developers with easier ways to make access control decisions based on combinations of multiple ID's, attributes, and policies. This solution is then implemented using the smart contract technology of Hyperledger Fabric, which allows it to easily be deployed to existing Hyperledger Fabric networks. Finally, the performance impact of this proposed implementation is analyzed, and new areas of research are proposed that can potentially be explored in future papers.

At the end of this research, it was concluded that it is possible to combine multiple ID's, attributes, and policies with the help of Hyperledger Fabric's smart contract technology. Furthermore, it could be seen that the performance impact for real-world applications is negligible compared to the insecure case of always providing access to a resource without performing access control.