Application of public ledgers to revocation in distributed access control

Abstract

Blockchain and similar public ledger structures provide a new way to publish information in distributed systems. This paper investigates their application to distributed access control and, more specifically, to distributed group membership management where entities are represented by public keys and authorization is encoded into signed certificates. We show that public ledgers with their fundamental security properties make it easier to handle revocations in distributed settings. We also present an efficient ledger design for membership revocation.