Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure with Identity Management using Hyperledger Fabric

Public key infrastructure (PKI) is one of the most effective ways to protect confidential electronic data on the internet. In centralized PKIs, the identity is defined by trusted third parties, specifically the Certificate Authority (CA). However, the security of the end-users becomes jeopardized if the CA gets compromised. To tackle this problem, the decentralized nature of the system can be used to eliminate a single point of failure. However, the lack of real-time support, the block complexity, and strict implementation are drawbacks that burden the practicality of these approaches. This study tries to evaluate the Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (DPKI) framework based on a permission-less model. The model itself is constructed over the decentralized identifier to manage the identity of users. We use the Hyperledger Fabric based blockchain network to create a hierarchy Certificate Authority, where each CA is a peer in a decentralized distributed network. Hence, each peer owns a separate database validated by the blockchain. We have evaluated the model efficacy in terms of the network latency and throughput. which were all found to be acceptable.