Application of Public Ledgers to Revocation in Distributed Access Control

There has recently been a flood of interest in potential new applications of, as well as proposals for more generic designs called public. Most of the novel proposals have been in the financial sector. , the public ledger is an abstraction that solves several of the problems in the design of secure distributed systems: global time the form of a strict linear order of past events, globally consistent and view of the history, and enforcement of some application-specific properties. This paper investigates the applications of public ledgers access control and, more specifically, to group management in distributed where entities are represented by their public keys and authorization encoded into signed certificates. It is particularly difficult to handle information, such as revocation of certificates or group membership, the distributed setting. The linear order of events and global consistency these problems, but the enforcement of internal constraints in the implementation often presents problems. We show that different types of require slightly different properties from the ledger. We compare requirements with Bitcoin, the best known blockchain, and describe an ledger design for membership revocation that combines ideas from and from web-PKI monitoring. While we use certificate-based-membership management as the case study, the same ideas can be applied widely to rights revocation in distributed systems.