ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Blockchain
Sec. Blockchain Security and Privacy
Volume 8 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbloc.2025.1630839
A Scaling Distributed Access Control Model for Blockchain-Based File Storage Systems
Provisionally accepted
- 1Federal Research Center Computer Science and Control (RAS), Moscow, Russia
- 2State Academic University for Humanities, Moscow, Russia
- 3Engineering Cybernetics Research Faculty National University of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Blockchain is considered as one of the popular solutions for decentralized data storage which offers high availability and data immutability due to the use of a specific structure for storing transaction blocks in combination with consensus algorithms. However, the nature of blockchain makes it not suitable for storing big amounts of data, like access control matrices which are typically used by discretionary access control. This research proposes a new access control model based on DAC and RBAC models that is capable of managing access of various users, by storing minimal data in blockchain, and full data off-chain. The article describes DecStore -blockchain-based file storage system and how access control model can be scaled to more than 1000 users and 1000 storage objects using a caching mechanism on the users' side. This makes it applicable to a wide range of systems, including IoT. This system uses a new model composed of several algorithms for users' access management. This research considers our previously discussed DecStore as a study case.
Keywords: Access control, Blockchain, Merkle tree, Decentralized system, File storage system
Received: 18 May 2025; Accepted: 10 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tarkhanov and Hammoud. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ivan Aleksandrovich Tarkhanov, Federal Research Center Computer Science and Control (RAS), Moscow, Russia
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.