Distributed Access Control in Cloud Computing Systems

Abstract

With the tremendous increase in the number of distributed applications, the issue of distributed access control has become an important research topic for both academia and industry. In distributed computing environments like cloud computing or service computing, authentication and authorization are the two important functions to be performed, to make sure that unauthorized users do not access distributed system components. An effective access control mechanism is an essential security component as far as protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of information hosted in the cloud is concerned. An effective access control mechanism implemented in the cloud domain should be scalable, reliable, and robust and it should provide required features and procedures for identity provisioning, deprovisioning, authentication, authorization, accounting, and auditing. In this chapter, we discuss the issue of distributed access control, major features and functionalities, access control policies and models, distributed access control architecture for multicloud environments, trust, and identity management in cloud computing environments. Related work shows some of the major research activities in the area of distributed access control considering the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches that have been adopted. We conclude this chapter by discussing a few research issues in the area of distributed access control in the cloud environment. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.