ROBAC: Scalable Role and Organization Based Access Control Models

Network and System Security

2014

Self Cite

Abstract. OpenStack has been rapidly established as the most popular open-source platform for cloud Infrastrusture-as-a-Service in this fast moving industry. In response to increasing access control requirements from its users, the OpenStack identity service Keystone has introduced several entities, such as domains and projects in addition to roles, resulting in a rather complex and somewhat obscure authorization model. In this paper, we present a formalized description of the core OpenStack access control (OSAC). We further propose a domain trust extension for OSAC to facilitate secure cross-domain authorization. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype of this trust extension based on Keystone. The authorization delay introduced by the domain trusts is 0.7 percent on average in our experiments.

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extending OpenStack Access Control with Domain Trust

Tang

Network and System Security

2014

Self Cite

“…Many cloud platforms such as OpenStack [16] adopted appropriate variations of RBAC for their access control mechanisms. In order to benefit RBAC capabilities across multiple organizations, model extensions such as ROBAC [25] and GB-RBAC [12] have been proposed. ROBAC manages authorization in multiple organizations which is comparable to multi-cloud, but organization collaboration is not explicitly granted in this RBAC extension.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authorization Federation in IaaS Multi Cloud

Pustchi

Krishnan

Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Security in Cloud Computing

2015

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As more and more organizations move to cloud, it is inevitable that cross-organizational collaboration will need to be supported in the cloud. In this paper, we explore models for collaboration among clouds whose resources are distributed across multiple cloud service providers. In particular, we focus on collaboration and sharing of resources in an infrastructure as a service cloud, where compute resources complemented with storage and networking are offered as a service to customers by cloud service providers. We develop a multi-cloud trust model at different scopes of administration. At cloud level, infrastructure resources can be shared between clouds. At lower administrative scopes, cloud service providers are able to share their resources and service instances among customers within multiple clouds. Finally, we formally specify the administrative aspects of multi-cloud collaboration models we develop. We have implemented a proof of concept prototype based on the administrative model of OpenStack, the de facto open-source software for building infrastructure as a service clouds.

“…Many RBAC extensions have been proposed to address access control problems among multiple organizations. Some extensions introduce centralized authority to specify or mediate cross‐domain policies. However, in cloud environment, the only existing centralized authority is the CSP who should maintain the generic policies for all the tenants rather than for specific ones because the tenants are temporary and self‐service oriented.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi‐tenancy authorization models for collaborative cloud services

Tang

Concurrency and Computation

2014

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Summary The cloud service model intrinsically caters to multiple tenants, most obviously not only in public clouds but also in private clouds for large organizations. Currently, most cloud service providers isolate user activities and data within a single tenant boundary with no or minimum cross‐tenant interaction. It is anticipated that this situation will evolve soon to foster cross‐tenant collaboration supported by Authorization as a Service. At present, there is no widely accepted model for cross‐tenant authorization. Recently, Calero et al. informally presented a multi‐tenancy authorization system (MTAS), which extends the well‐known role‐based access control model by building trust relations among collaborating tenants. In this paper, we formalize this MTAS model and propose extensions for finer‐grained cross‐tenant trust. We also develop an administration model for MTAS. We demonstrate the utility and practical feasibility of MTAS by means of an example policy specification in extensible access control markup language. To further test the metrics of the model, we develop a prototype system and conduct experiments on it. The result shows that the prototype has 12‐ms policy decision overhead on average and is scalable. We anticipate that researchers will develop additional multi‐tenant authorization models before eventual consolidation and convergence to standard industry practice. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.