Hyperledger Global Forum

Ever since Bitcoin, there has been a lot of interest in the idea of decentralizing other services/applications using the under-lying blockchain. The notion of distributing control to several entities instead of a single entity guarantees and
improves the security of an application. We propose decentralization of access controls on file storage system with a combination of blockchain, erasure codes and secret sharing. Traditional access control mechanisms restrict access to the data through a layered approach and are centralized. These mechanisms can be single point of failure. Hence, decentralizing the access controls improves the security guarantees of the system significantly. We also present an implementation of permissioned blockchain based decentralized access control system with Hyperledger Fabric. We also enforce immutable access logging mechanism to ensure all the accesses to the files are recorded on blockchain eliminating insider threat of bypassing the blockchain to provide access to a file.