The specification and enforcement of network-wide policies in a single administrative domain is common in today's networks and considered as already resolved. However, this is not the case for multi-administrative domains, e.g. among different enterprises. In such situation, new problems arise that challenge classical solutions such as PKIs, which suffer from scalability and granularity concerns. In this paper, we present an extension to Group-Based Policy &#x2014; a widely used network policy language-for the aforementioned scenario. To do so, we take advantage of a permissioned blockchain implementation (Hyperledger Fabric) to distribute access control policies in a secure and auditable manner, preserving at the same time the independence of each organization. Network administrators specify polices that are rendered into blockchain transactions. A LISP control plane (RFC 6830) allows routers performing the access control to query the blockchain for authorizations. We have implemented an end-to-end experimental prototype and evaluated it in terms of scalability and network latency.
There are already several proposals in the literature @cite_7 that leverage blockchains for a wide range of network applications, such as mesh networks @cite_15 , IP addresses @cite_1 , etc.
@cite_15 @cite_1 @cite_7
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Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate Internet access. While mesh networking makes connecting to the Internet easy and affordable, blockchain on top of mesh networks makes Internet access profitable by enabling bandwidth-sharing for crypto-tokens. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory. We quantify the performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation v1.0. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless mesh access networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first HLF deployment made in a production wireless mesh network. We present IPchain, a blockchain to store the allocations and delegations of IP addresses, with the aim of easing the deployment of secure interdomain routing systems. Interdomain routing security is of vital importance to the Internet since it prevents unwanted traffic redirections. IPchain makes use of blockchains' properties to provide flexible trust models and simplified management when compared to existing systems. In this paper we argue that Proof of Stake is a suitable consensus algorithm for IPchain due to the unique incentive structure of this use-case. We have implemented and evaluated IPchain's performance and scalability storing around 150k IP prefixes in a 1GB chain. Recent interest about the blockchain technology brought questions about its application to other systems than the cryptocurrency one. In this paper we present blockchain and discuss key applications to network systems in the literature.