Dynamic Trust Based Access Control Framework for Securing Multi-Cloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud Computing are used to deliver services from share pool of computing resources. These resources are provided to the user using the internet. It has advantage over traditional computing services along with new challenge. These are data security, privacy, protection, access control, availability, authentication, scalability, lock-in and confidentiality. These are inherent security flaws of cloud technology due to openness, multi-tenancy, outsourcing of resources. Access control is a fundamental security mechanism but traditional access control like as mandatory, discretionary and role based access control are not suitable. These traditional existing access control model are not effective and feasible solutions for cloud. In this research work, novel access control framework is proposed that can address the security and privacy issues for cloud. The framework is based on dynamic trustworthiness of user and provides an effective and feasible access control solution for cloud. A multi layer security standard, policies and access control mechanism are provided with proposed framework. The access control is based on the trustworthiness of the user, which is demonstrated by static and dynamic trust evidence. The dynamic trustworthiness is used to reduce the possibility to perform unauthorized activities and ensures that only authorized user's access cloud resources. The prototype of the proposed framework is developed in NetLogo on Linux platform and demonstrated with test cases. The analysis of simulated results shows that proposed mechanism is highly efficient and robust under existing security threats.