During the last six months, I had the chance to work as a part-time intern for the “Hyperledger Fabric-Based Access Control” project. It was my first contribution to an open source project, which was a great learning experience for me. I believe that contribution to an open source project leads to better understanding and more in-depth knowledge by accessing unlimited resources. I also had the chance to work with two amazing mentors from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Professor Rui Cruz and Rafael Belchior.
Project Introduction and goals
The project goal was to create an attribute-based access control system on top of Hyperledger Fabric. We presented a system architecture with an implementation based on Hyperledger Fabric. We used the Google Cloud Platform to run a Virtual Machine instance and test our application and collect performance analysis data. The proposed solution was validated through a multi-stakeholder use case of independent digital libraries. Our preliminary evaluation based on Hyperledger Caliper shows that the system can achieve around 200 access control requests per second, with a latency of around 0.3 seconds.
Project accomplishments
- Developing System modelling and architecture (Figure 1)
- Implementing the attribute-based access control components as Hyperledger Fabric ChainCode (smart contracts) and creating a simple front-end interface to interact with blockchain application
- Conducting performance analysis based on Hyperledger Caliper
- Analyzing performance data and graph visualization using matplot library
- Presenting the project in the format of academic paper
Figure 1. System architecture
Future works
Currently, our project only addresses the authorization components. This project can be expanded to be integrated with the authentication component as well, for example, it can be integrated with Hyperledger Indy, as Hyperledger Indy provides a powerful structure for decentralized identity and systems authentication.
I want to thank the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger team for providing this opportunity for me and all the other mentees. I also want to especially thank Min Yu. I greatly appreciate her kind assistance during the whole internship program. Lastly, I want to thank my two fantastic mentors, Professor Rui Cruz and Rafael Belchior. I truly appreciate and value everything I have learned from you.
For more details, please see my complete project report here.