Secure Access Control to Cloud Resources using Blockchain

With the steady increase in complexity of cloud computing and other technologies, there has been a significant concern for providing privacy and data security. For secure access of cloud resources, protection of sensitive data is essential. The critical data that relates to resource provisioning in cloud environment includes key pairs and IP addresses. The user needs this critical data to access the resources which has been provisioned. In conventional systems, this data is directly provided to the user. This technique results in local storage and opens up a vulnerability of snooping by a malicious intruder. Furthermore, the user needs to repeatedly remember the key pairs and other information of all the created resources. Recently, Blockchain, with its decentralized and immutable features is being explored in the design access control mechanism. In this work, we design blockchain based access control mechanism to access cloud resources. We use OpenStack cloud to provision the resources, store the critical data of resources in Ethereum blockchain and use secure access control to cloud resources. We also carry out the scalability and performance analysis of the blockchain based system using Ethereum platform.