Protecting outsourced data in cloud computing through access management

Abstract

SummaryData outsourcing is a major component for cloud computing because data owners are able to distribute resources to external services for sharing with users and organizations. A crucial problem for owners is how to secure sensitive information accessed by legitimate users only using the trusted services. We address the problem with access control methods to enforce selective access to outsourced data without involving the owner in authorization. The basic idea is to combine cryptography with authorizations, and data owners assign keys to roles that will enforce access via encryption. A formal access model is designed to analyze the translating an authorization policy into an equivalent encryption policy. The paper also investigates the effect of role hierarchy structure in the authorization process. The role‐based access management methods are implemented with XACML by using WSO Identity Server. The comparisons with other related work are presented. Finally, the future work is introduced.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.