RC-AAM: blockchain-enabled decentralized role-centric authentication and access management for distributed organizations

In large organizations, we achieve security by limiting unnecessary access to shared resources based on the users' roles. It reduces administrative work and enhances security. Due to the security requirements of role-centric authentication and access management, it is challenging to create an efficient centralized system for distributed applications. Centralized authentication and access control systems are prone to single-point failure, security threats, privacy, and scalability issues. This paper presents a decentralized role-centric authentication and resource access management technique called RC-AAM. It relies on the security features provided by cryptography and blockchain, and provides role ownership proof, role verification, and role validation without depending on a central authority. RC-AAM prototype is deployed and tested on the Ethereum test network. The results show that the proposed technique is efficient in terms of access management, permissions verification, incurs low cost, and is able to satisfy distributed environment requirements. Moreover, it shows superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art techniques of role-centric authentication and access management.