Blockchain based auditable access control for business processes with event driven policies

Akhtar, Ahmed, Barati, Masoud, Shafiq, Basit, Rana, Omer ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3597-2646, Afzal, Ayesha, Vaidya, Jaideep and Shamail, Shafay 2024. Blockchain based auditable access control for business processes with event driven policies. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 10.1109/TDSC.2024.3356811

Preview

PDF - Accepted Post-Print Version Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

The use of blockchain technology has been proposed to provide auditable access control for individual resources. Unlike the case where all resources are owned by a single organization, this work focuses on distributed applications such as business processes and distributed workflows. These applications are often composed of multiple resources/services that are subject to the security and access control policies of different organizational domains. Here, blockchains provide an attractive decentralized solution to provide auditability. However, the underlying access control policies may have event-driven constraints and can be overlapping in terms of the component conditions/rules as well as events. Existing work cannot handle event-driven constraints and does not sufficiently account for overlaps leading to significant overhead in terms of cost and computation time for evaluating authorizations over the blockchain. In this work, we propose an automata-theoretic approach for generating a cost-efficient composite access control policy. We reduce this composite policy generation problem to the standard weighted set cover problem. We show that the composite policy correctly captures all the local access control policies and reduces the policy evaluation cost over the blockchain. We have implemented the initial prototype of our approach using Ethereum as the underlying blockchain and empirically validated the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Ablation studies were conducted to determine the impact of changes in individual service policies on the overall cost.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ISSN:	1545-5971
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	26 January 2024
Date of Acceptance:	3 January 2024
Last Modified:	12 Feb 2024 10:22
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165872

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item