Thesis to obtain the Master of Science Degree in Information and Enterprise Systems.

Title: Exploring Permissioned Blockchains for Decentralizing Access Control

Abstract:

Protecting sensitive or private information is of the utmost importance. Information breaches, and sharing of sensitive information can have serious legal, reputation and financial impacts for individuals and organizations. At the same time, our technological landscape is getting more and more complex and distributed, being increasingly hard to protect information. A particular demonstration of this situation can be found in institutions providing certificates of accomplishment, such as Universities, who have been increasing efforts to shut down fake certificate generators online, while working in an environment where validation of credentials is essential, yet, done sporadically and requiring interactions between several parties. This situation exposes a gap between the needs of modern, complex distributed environments, in regards to control of access to information, and the level to which classic access control solutions can fulfill those needs. This thesis explores permissioned blockchains as technological vehicles for decentralizing access control, applied to this specific use case. This thesis proposes \texttt{Blocked}, a system that allows decentralized access control, through a permissioned blockchain, for issuing, sharing and managing educational certificates. An evaluation of this system demonstrates that it can be considered a suitable access control system, with improvements over the existing decentralized solutions for the same problem.

• pygmentize
• latexmk

$ make thesis

(...)

Latexmk: All targets (main.pdf) are up-to-date

GPL-3.0. Copyright © 2018 Hugo Martins.