A blockchain-based access control protocol for secure resource sharing with mobile edge-cloud collaboration

The application scenarios of edge-cloud collaboration are very wide. In order to ensure the operational security of resource sharing among intelligent terminals in edge-cloud collaboration scenarios, and prevent unauthorized entities from accessing sensitive data, a blockchain-based access control protocol for secure resource sharing is proposed. For the characteristics of edge-cloud collaborative application scenarios, the attribute authentication, secure storage, intra-domain access control, inter-domain access control and dynamic update of access permissions are studied in this paper. The proposed protocol has the following advantages. (1) Privacy protection: in the edge-cloud collaborative application scenario, the privacy of mobile terminals is easily leaked. The access control technology with hidden attributes is adopted, which can not only achieve the purpose of access control, but also ensure that the identity and attribute information of terminals are not leaked; (2) cross-domain access control: edge-cloud collaborative application scenarios, resource sharing among terminals may span multiple different security domains, and the proposed protocol supports cross-domain access control; (3) dynamic access control: some mobile terminals may frequently join or exit some application scenarios, the access permissions of these terminals can be dynamically updated using blockchain in this protocol; (4) fine-grained access control: the permissions for access resources are set by the combination of attribute permissions of the terminals. The terminal can access a variety of resources by setting different combinations of its attribute permissions. The performance analysis shows that compared with the cited literatures, the proposed protocol has advantages in terms of computational time, computational complexity and communication overhead. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.