Security of Cloud Federation

Federated Cloud is a recent topic in which multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSP) interact and share resources in order to serve their clients and overcome the problem of limited resources. In a Federated environment, CSP have an unlimited amount of resources due to the fact that each CSP can use the resources of other CSPs to serve its own clients when its own resources cannot do it. In a same concept, CSPs will be able to sell their unused capacity for other CSPs. From this definition, CSPs could buy resources in the federation in order to serve the upcoming requests that go beyond one CSP capacity. Also, by selling resources, CSPs will increase their revenues. A pre-agreement must be done between CSPs willing to participate to the federation in order to define the rules that manage such environment. Security is one of the main issues in cloud federation that should be provided. In this paper, we will describe different cloud environments before proposing a security strategy and security model that can be integrated in federation cloud.