CFAC: An Approach of Chaincodes Firewall Combining Access Control in Consortium Blockchain

Blockchain technology is disrupting each and every industry as it is adopted at a massive rate by enterprises of every nature: small, medium, and large. More and more companies are realizing the revolutionary potential of this technology and are looking to leverage it for their daily operations. Similar to any other information systems, outstanding problems in security and privacy must be solved to reach its full potential. This thesis proposes a solution named chaincodes firewall middleware based on the most famous consortium blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric, which mainly focuses on the access control against ledger data, especially read operation. This middleware can intercept every request of reading or writing from applications against chaincodes interface, carry out access control using black-white lists, policy check, etc. and record operation attributes and access control results using custom-developed chaincodes automatically without any human intervention. It is worthy mentioned that any application based on consortium blockchain can utilize chaincodes firewall functionalities in pluggable mode, which means they only need pay fewer cost to build chaincodes firewall. The experiment shows that CFAC can meet practical security requirements of application based on consortium blockchain with reasonable time cost.