Middleware-Layer for Authenticating Mobile Consumers of Amazon S3 Data

Abstract

Today, most enterprises are embracing the cloud computing paradigm to provide reliable access to business data for mobile consumers. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is one platform that is fault tolerant and highly scalable within the cloud provisioning landscape. However, the Amazon S3 facility relies on the submission of multiple identification credentials from the data consumer for the purposes of authentication and authorization. This authentication process introduces high communication latency which makes it uninteresting for mobile consumption of enterprise data in a highly distributed environment. This paper presents a middleware-centric framework called MiLAMob that simplifies the authentication process in real time. The middleware employs the OAuth 2.0 technique (E.g. Facebook, Google+, and Personal Login) to identify the end-user and uses security tokens to handle the tedious authentication with Amazon S3 on behalf of the user/requester. The approach adopted by this paper proves that mobile consumers can efficiently access enterprise data hosted on Amazon S3 in a single request call with less processing effort. Also, the introduction of the middleware enforces additional data protection because the security credentials and the Amazon S3 abstractions are hidden from the mobile application domain and the end users.