Self-adaptive access control & delegation in cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has seen significant progress in the last decade, and is still on the rise. A big number of companies are shifting their infrastructure to the cloud because of the numerous advantages it offers, such as rapid elasticity and scalability. However, moving to the cloud also presents a number of challenges. In this paper we focus on one of the major challenges, i.e., access control and delegation in a cloud environment. There exist many frameworks and models that solve issues pertinent to this area and allow dynamic delegation of access rights. However, none of them are robust enough to handle unprecedented changes, i.e., situations not handled at the time of requirements engineering. We've presented a risk-based, self-adaptive access control and delegation framework that caters to such situations by continuously monitoring and evaluating the user risk score and environmental factors, and automatically adapting to the changes incurred by reconfiguring the system. The proposed framework is able to adapt to unprecedented change as it can delegate access rights to previously unauthorized users in an emergency situation and revoke users' access rights based on environmental factors, while running in a continuous feedback loop.