Dynamic Role-Based Access Control for Decentralized Applications
This addresses access control security and governance issues for decentralized applications, offering a solution that integrates with existing identity management systems, though it appears incremental in applying role-based concepts to a new domain.
The paper tackles the lack of on-chain access control frameworks for decentralized applications by proposing a novel dynamic role-based access control framework that decouples access control from business logic, enabling secure, low-cost, and flexible management with decentralized governance.
Access control management is an integral part of maintaining the security of an application. Although there has been significant work in the field of cloud access control mechanisms, however, with the advent of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), on-chain access control management frameworks hardly exist. Existing access control management mechanisms are tightly coupled with the business logic, resulting in governance issues, non-coherent with existing Identity Management Solutions, low security, and compromised usability. We propose a novel framework to implement dynamic role-based access control for decentralized applications (dApps). The framework allows for managing access control on a dApp, which is completely decoupled from the business application and integrates seamlessly with any dApps. The smart contract architecture allows for the independent management of business logic and execution of access control policies. It also facilitates secure, low cost, and a high degree of flexibility of access control management. The proposed framework promotes decentralized governance of access control policies and efficient smart contract upgrades. We also provide quantitative and qualitative metrics for the efficacy and efficiency of the framework. Any Turing complete smart contract programming language is an excellent fit to implement the framework. We expect this framework to benefit enterprise and non-enterprise dApps and provide greater access control flexibility and effective integration with traditional and state of the art identity management solutions.