Management of User Groups and Member Authorization with Various Access Rights on the Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

Distributed applications based on the Ethereum blockchain have a great advantage in the analysis of the history of group work and the contribution factor to a group project of each group member. In these applications, multiple users share resources and their histories together in a robust way thanks to the characteristics of the blockchain that is practically impossible to be forged or modified. However, there has not yet been developed a scheme for providing a systematic management scheme of a group of users or authentication of the members of the group to allow the members to use shared resources through various access rights. In this paper, we propose a user group and authorization management scheme over the Ethereum Blockchain. In the proposed scheme, group users can use shared resources by using various access rights. To do this, we define user groups as different types according to their access rights, and present the process of authenticating user groups according to their types. The proposed scheme is designed using smart contracts, being useful in various Ethereum distributed applications requiring group workspaces.