DEDACS: Decentralized and dynamic access control for smart contracts in a policy-based manner

Abstract

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLTs) or blockchains have been steadily emerging and providing innovation in the past decade for several use cases, ranging from financial networks, to notarization, or trustworthy execution via smart contracts. DLTs are enticing due to their properties of decentralization, non-repudiation, and auditability (transparency). These properties are of high potential to access control systems that can be implemented on-chain, and are executed without infringement and full transparency. While it remains uncertain which use cases will truly turn out to be viable, many use cases such as financial transactions can benefit from integrating certain restrictions via access control on the blockchain. In addition, smart contracts may in the future present security risks that are currently yet unknown. As a solution, access control policies can provide flexibility in the execution flow when adopted by smart contracts. In this paper, we present our DEDACS architecture which provides decentralized and dynamic access control for smart contracts in a policy-based manner. Our access control is expressive as it features policies, and dynamic as the environment or users can be changed, or alternative policies can be assigned to smart contracts. DEDACS ensures that our access control preserves the desired properties of decentralization and transparency, while aiming to keep the costs involved as minimal as possible. We have evaluated DEDACS in the context of a Uniswap token-exchange platform, in which we evaluated the costs related to (i) the introduced overhead at deployment time and (ii) the operational overhead cost. DEDACS introduces a relative overhead of on average 52% at deployment time, and an operational overhead between 52% and 80% depending on the chosen policy and its complexity.