Delta Authorization Concept for Dynamic Access Control Model in Cloud Environment

Abstract

Advancement in distributed computing and Internet-based computing, like cloud, has put high concerns on security issues. Identity and access management is one such issue that requires urgent attention. Both data privacy and user privacy need to be protected in privacy-aware cloud computing applications. Anonymous user interaction helps users to privately interact with any system. It must be made sure that unauthorized entity should not get access to data resources. Hence, identity credentials may not always be enough. Different contexts like user role, trust, behavior may be considered as an identity context required to authenticate the user for an active session. In any privacy-aware system, a wrong interaction might provide improper data access. Therefore, dynamic decision-making may also be required for a proper access session to continue. Quasi-static authorization models consider reauthorization at regular intervals. At the end of each interval, the user is again verified against his various contexts if the resource access is to be continued. Many research works focus on fine-grained access control model in highly dynamic environments. However, handling the contexts is the main concern in these types of access model. In this chapter, we propose an access model with the concept of delta authorization with an easy user session out process. Here, authorization not only proceeds at delta intervals, but also considers contextual information besides usual credentials. This technique is able to handle fine-grained access control in a better way. An implementation with the analysis is also presented.