A generic Kerberos-based access control system for the cloud

Abstract

Access control systems are often seen as the most effective tool to address the security challenges faced by cloud computing. Most of the proposed approaches are designed for specific application domains or service models. The goal of this paper is to propose a generic access control system for the cloud that is applicable to the different cloud service models. We rely on Kerberos as well as access control lists and authorization tickets for the implementation of access control and no replay. We use CloudSim to evaluate our proposal and show that it has an acceptable overhead. We also show that the architecture’s elasticity has no significant impact on the access time. To prove its feasibility, we implemented the proposed solution over an Openstack cloud platform integrated within Kerberos.