DECENTRALIZED ACCESS CONTROL USING THE BLOCKCHAIN

To effectively participate in modern collaborations, member organizations should be able to share digital resources with various partners, while ensuring their digital resources are protected from inappropriate access. In the existing literature, a substantial amount of research on centralized access control in the context of a single organization has been carried out. However, research on decentralized access control in a collaborative environment is scarce. To advance research in this area, I implemented a prototype of a decentralized access control system, which supports transparency, auditability, immutability, and equality in a collaboration environment, using the Multichain blockchain platform, RESTful web services, and Java programming language. The prototype was developed to evaluate two primary metrics: average response time and throughput. To achieve this, I carried out a number of experiments to measure both metrics on a Local Area Network (LAN) and on Amazon Web Services (AWS) under 84 different experimental conditions. The LAN setup provides a baseline for system performance under optimal conditions, while the cloud infrastructure represents a real-world use case. With low-system loads (comprising one to thirty concurrent clients and a single server running the system), the LAN setup outperformed the AWS setup by a factor of 2.5 based on throughput. On the other hand, when the system load is significantly increased, with more servers running the system, the AWS and LAN setups showed only a marginal difference in their performance. This demonstrates the potential to horizontally scale the decentralized access control system using blockchain on cloud infrastructure