Chord Based Identity Management for e-Healthcare Cloud Applications

Increase in healthcare awareness has raised the number of subscriptions for e-Healthcare applications. Consequently e-Healthcare application providers are adopting Cloud computing to handle immense processing load and to reduce service delivery cost. Identity management has been an issue which hinders in adoption of e-Healthcare applications, due to sensitivity of the data involved in it. Existing Cloud based e-Healthcare applications provide access to their services though Single-Sign-On (SSO) protocols. Traditional SSO uses asymmetric encryption, thus increasing the execution load on Cloud gateway and on Identity Provider as well. In this paper we propose a methodology of SSO for Cloud applications by utilizing Peer-to-Peer concepts to distribute processing load among computing nodes within Cloud. The proposed scheme, called Chord for Cloud (C4C), decreases the number of authentication request send to Identity Provider and disseminates the authentication process within the federated environment of Cloud, through Chord algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed technique has been shown through argumentation scenarios.