Blockchain-based multi-party authorization for accessing iPFS encrypted data

Ammar Ayman Battah, Mohammad Moussa Madine, Hamad Alzaabi, Ibrar Yaqoob, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

44 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multi-party authorization (MPA) typically involves multiple parties to control and grant access to shared data. MPA is used to solve the insider’s attack problem by ensuring that a single authority or party is not acting alone. Currently, almost all existing implementations of MPA are centralized and fall short in providing logs and events related to provenance of granting permissions in a trusted, secure, immutable, auditable, and decentralized manner. Moreover, for sharing data, proxy re-encryption algorithms are often used to give secure access to encrypted shared data. These schemes and algorithms are also centralized and cannot be trusted. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized blockchain-based solution in which MPA is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts, and proxy re-encryption algorithms (which are computationally expensive) are implemented using multiple oracles to give access to encrypted shared data stored on a public and decentralized storage platform, such as the Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS). The smart contracts help to validate results based on the majority of encrypted results determined by the oracles. For this, we incorporate reputation mechanisms in the proposed smart contracts to rate the oracles based on their malicious and non-malicious behaviors. We present algorithms along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We evaluate the proposed system in terms of security, cost, and generalization to show its reliability and practicality. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.

Original languageBritish English
Pages (from-to)196813-196825
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Access
Volume8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Access control
  • Authentication
  • Blockchain
  • Encrypted files
  • Ethereum
  • Multi-party authority

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Blockchain-based multi-party authorization for accessing iPFS encrypted data'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this