Multi-party authorization and conflict mediation for decentralized configuration management processes

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized configuration management system using multi-party authorization and conflict mediation, implemented on Hyperledger Fabric to enhance security and resilience against malicious or compromised administrators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel conflict mediation approach within a multi-party authorization framework, integrated into the TANCS system on a tamper-resistant distributed ledger.

Findings

Conflict mediation strategies improve decision outcomes

TANCS ensures tamper-resistant, decentralized configuration management

System effectively handles conflicting administrator inputs

Abstract

Configuration management in networks with highest security demands must not depend on just one administrator and her device. Otherwise, problems can be caused by mistakes or malicious behavior of this admin, or when her computer got compromised, which allows an attacker to abuse the administrator's far-reaching permissions. Instead, we propose to use a reliable and resilient configuration management process orchestrated by a configuration management system (CMS). This can be achieved by separation of concerns (proposing a configuration vs. authorizing it), employing multi-party authorization (MPA), and enforcing that only authorized configurations can be deployed. This results in a configuration management process that is decentralized on a human, decision-making level, and a technical, device level. However, due to different opinions or adversarial interference, the result of an MPA process can end in a conflict. This raises the question how such conflicts can be mediated in a better way than just employing majority voting, which is insufficient in certain situations. As an alternative, this paper introduces building blocks of customizable conflict mediation strategies which we integrated into our CMS TANCS . The conflict mediation functionality as well as the initial TANCS implementation run on top of the distributed ledger and smart contract framework Hyperledger Fabric which makes all processes resilient and tamper-resistant.