Towards a Secure and Scalable Access Control System Using Blockchain
Zakaria Abou El Houda, Jérémy Beaugeard, Quentin Sauvêtre, Lyes Khoukhi · 2023
Access control, both physical and virtual, has always been a crucial aspect in maintaining the security of corporate information systems. Recently, several solutions have been proposed to address physical and virtual access control, including the use of electronic badges that can be costly to produce and easily misplaced. Additionally, numerous, sometimes expensive, cloud-based solutions have also been adopted. However, these solutions are often provided by third-party organizations, which require entities to place trust in these providers, a risk that is unacceptable for industries such as the military and banking. To solve this issue, we propose a novel Blockchain-based solution to establish a scalable and secure system for managing access controls. Blockchain offers a secure, decentralized, and most importantly, immutable alternative that eliminates the need for trust in third-party providers. We have implemented, tested, and deployed our Blockchain-based access control architecture on the Avalanche official network. The results demonstrate that this solution offers strong security, flexibility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, making it a promising approach to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT). Our deployment on the Avalanche network confirms the feasibility and robustness of our approach in a real-world setting.