SBAC: A secure blockchain-based access control framework for information-centric networking

The information-centric networking (ICN) has been proposed to meet the increasing demand for efficient content delivery. However, the in-network caching mechanism of ICN makes it hard to provide data security and privacy for content providers (CPs). Although many access control schemes are proposed to improve the security of ICN, there are still some problems unsolved. On the one hand, in spite of the centralized access control schemes are proposed to improve the security of data sharing, the single point of failure issue is inevitable. On the other hand, the decentralized access control schemes allow the content provider to control the key distribution for encrypted content, but it is inefficient when they are applied in hierarchical access, and the audit of content access is ignored. In this paper, we propose a secure blockchain-based access control framework which is called as SBAC, to provide a content provider with the ability of sharing, audit and revocation on his content in a secure way. Specifically, we design a matching-based access control model to achieve hierarchical access, and present a blockchain-based access token mechanism to resist the single point of failure and balance privacy and audit. And Cuckoo filter is introduced to achieve efficient query of access token in verification. Furthermore, our SBAC keeps the characteristic of pervasive caching of ICN. The security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that SBAC is suitable in practice.