An Exploration of Blockchain Enabled Decentralized Capability based Access Control Strategy for Space Situation Awareness
This addresses the need for secure identity authentication and access control in SSA networks to prevent performance bottlenecks or single points of failure, though it appears incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of decentralized and heterogeneous access control in space situation awareness (SSA) systems by proposing BlendCAC, a blockchain-based authentication and capability mechanism, and demonstrates its feasibility through a prototype tested on a private Ethereum network, showing it offers a decentralized, scalable, lightweight, and fine-grained solution.
Space situation awareness (SSA) includes tracking of active and inactive resident space objects (RSOs) and assessing the space environment through sensor data collection and processing. To enhance SSA, the dynamic data-driven applications systems (DDDAS) framework couples on-line data with off-line models to enhance system performance. Using feedback control, sensor management, and communications reliability. For information management, there is a need for identity authentication and access control to ensure the integrity of exchanged data as well as to grant authorized entities access right to data and services. Due to decentralization and heterogeneity of SSA systems, it is challenging to build an efficient centralized access control system, which could either be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure. Inspired by the blockchain and smart contract technology, this paper introduces BlendCAC, a decentralized authentication and capability-based access control mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services and information in SSA networks. To achieve secure identity authentication, the BlendCAC leverages the blockchain to create virtual trust zones and a robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices and more powerful computing devices, and is tested on a private Ethereum blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC scheme to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight and fine-grained access control solution for space system towards SSA.