Blockchain-based decentralized public key infrastructure for digital credentials
department or school: Applied Science, Faculty of
department or school: Engineering, School of (Okanagan)
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCO
creator: Huang, Yuhao
issued: 2025-09-10T07:00:00Z
issued: 2025
related degree: Master of Applied Science - MASc
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), especially the X.509 standard, is the backbone of secure digital communication, providing essential services such as authentication, encryption, and digital signature verification. X.509 enables a certificate chain of trust, where Certificate Authorities (CAs) serve as the central trust anchors. While X.509 has proven to be effective in traditional centralized environments, it faces significant challenges such as single points of failure, vulnerability to CA breaches, and limited scalability in a globally distributed network. With the rise of decentralized technologies like blockchain, there is growing interest in developing Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (DPKI) systems that eliminate these weaknesses by distributing trust across multiple entities. However, the majority of DPKI research either conflicts with X.509 standard, giving up CA as trust anchor, or focuses on general identity management. Especially, there are few research works concentrated on X.509 compatible DPKI systems designed for digital credentials. This thesis addresses the gap by investigating the integration of DPKI with X.509 specifically for managing digital credentials. A thorough literature review identified Trustchain as the most relevant and advanced stateof-the-art framework addressing this topic. Trustchain employs blockchain technology for digital credential management but also exhibits key design limitations. Using Trustchain as a foundational benchmark, this thesis introduces BCChain, a modified DPKI system that enhances identity validation, and incorporates a multi-root architecture, advancing blockchain-based DPKI compatibility with X.509 while improving security and scalability. This thesis also proposes a use case in education by simulation to further illustrate the application of my system.
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/92288
note: Blockchain-based Decentralized PublicKey Infrastructure for DigitalCredentialsbyYuhao HuangB.Sc., Northwestern Polytechnical University, 2022A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFMASTER OF APPLIED SCIENCEinThe College of Graduate Studies(Electrical Engineering)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Okanagan)September 2025© Yuhao Huang, 2025The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommendto the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation en-titled:Blockchain-based Decentralized Public Key Infrastructurefor Digital Credentialssubmitted by Yuhao Huang in partial fulfilment of the requirements ofthe degree of Master of Applied ScienceChen Feng, School of EngineeringSupervisorBabak Mohamadpmy Tosarkani, School of EngineeringSupervisory Committee MemberAhmad Al-Dabbagh, School of EngineeringSupervisory Committee MemberEric Li, Faculty of ManagementUniversity ExamineriiAbstractPublic Key Infrastructure (PKI), especially the X.509 standard, is thebackbone of secure digital communication, providing essential services suchas authentication, encryption, and digital signature verification. X.509 en-ables a certificate chain of trust, where Certificate Authorities (CAs) serveas the central trust anchors. While X.509 has proven to be effective in tradi-tional centralized environments, it faces significant challenges such as singlepoints of failure, vulnerability to CA breaches, and limited scalability ina globally distributed network. With the rise of decentralized technologieslike blockchain, there is growing interest in developing Decentralized Pub-lic Key Infrastructure (DPKI) systems that eliminate these weaknesses bydistributing trust across multiple entities. However, the majority of DPKIresearch either conflicts with X.509 standard, giving up CA as trust anchor,or focuses on general identity management. Especially, there are few re-search works concentrated on X.509 compatible DPKI systems design…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2025-11
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0450099
language: eng
degree discipline: Electrical Engineering
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: Feng, Chen
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/92288