Blockchain-based RBAC for user authentication with anonymity
YongJoo Lee, Keon Myung Lee · 2019
RBAC is a traditional approach of controlling who wants to access resources in a computer system through a permission to a role. Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can permanently record transactions. Smart Contract facilitates negotiations for a trustless transaction by enabling automatic payment. It is currently being applied to various kinds of business applications. In a smart contract that requires payment with cryptocurrency, if access control is performed only without individual authentication, progress for applications to various fields will be restricted. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based RBAC with an authentication mechanism that can provides role-based access control while also providing individual account-based authentication. We have defined three interfaces based on blockchain to realize it. The proposed mechanism provides anonymity-based authentication by using a hash function with a pass that is indistinguishable from the owner. This was simulated on an Ethereum-based test network and compared with existing methods. The proposed mechanism not only added authentication methods, but also was more efficient in gas use and performance time than the existing RBAC model.