Book Image

Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger

By : Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, Salman A. Baset, Anthony O'Dowd
Book Image

Hands-On Blockchain with Hyperledger

By: Nitin Gaur, Luc Desrosiers, Venkatraman Ramakrishna, Petr Novotny, Salman A. Baset, Anthony O'Dowd

Overview of this book

Blockchain and Hyperledger technologies are hot topics today. Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer are open source projects that help organizations create private, permissioned blockchain networks. These find application in finance, banking, supply chain, and IoT among several other sectors. This book will be an easy reference to explore and build blockchain networks using Hyperledger technologies. The book starts by outlining the evolution of blockchain, including an overview of relevant blockchain technologies. You will learn how to configure Hyperledger Fabric and become familiar with its architectural components. Using these components, you will learn to build private blockchain networks, along with the applications that connect to them. Starting from principles first, you’ll learn to design and launch a network, implement smart contracts in chaincode and much more. By the end of this book, you will be able to build and deploy your own decentralized applications, handling the key pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Access control


Before we delve into the implementation of Chaincode functions, we need to first define our access control mechanism.

A key feature of a secure and permissioned blockchain is access control. In Fabric, the Membership Services Provider (MSP) plays a pivotal role in enabling access control. Each organization of a Fabric network can have one or more MSP providers. The MSP is implemented as a Certificate Authority (Fabric CA). More information on Fabric CA, including its documentation, is available at: https://hyperledger-fabric-ca.readthedocs.io/.

Fabric CA issues Enrollment Certificates (ecerts) for network users. The ecert represents the identity of the user and is used as a signed transaction when a user submits to Fabric. Prior to invoking a transaction, the user must therefore first register and obtain an ecert from the Fabric CA.

Fabric supports an Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) mechanism that can be used by the chaincode to control access to its functions and data...