Smart Contract Based Next-Generation Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Using Permissionless Blockchain

The traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions are centralized and non-transparent schemes which struggle to combat the current era of distributed applications. One of the major challenging issues of the trusted third party is the issuance of rouge certificates. So the centralized certification authorities can’t be trusted as they may be compromised by disrupting the TLS method for various hosts. In this paper, we have proposed a distributed and transparent PKI system that uses smart contracts while employing a web-of-trust model and runs on the Ethereum blockchain. This work is inspired by the SCPKI system proposed by Mustafa Al-Bassam, which is a Smart Contract-based PKI and Identity System. Our scheme can detect authority certificates after they are printed. We have presented the working prototype of proposed scheme on permissionless ethereum blockchain, with detailed implementation of smart contracts.