Self adaptations in access control models in context of cloud computing

Access control models are widely adopted by IT industry as they restrict access to the digital data and resources. While different access control models have been presented in literature, there is an issue which has not been investigated so far i.e. the need for self-adaptation in access control models in distributed computing environment. We have presented in-depth analysis, which demonstrates that the existing traditional and non-traditional access control models are unable to cope up with the challenges of dynamic adaptations in the system due to unprecedented changes which are not identified at requirement engineering time. Due to runtime changes either in the operational environment of a system or in user requirements, system changes its behaviour dynamically. Hence for a system that has been deployed in cloud computing environment where user requirements change dynamically, a useful access control model is the one that can handle the authorization requests along with the runtime changes in the system. This paper presents the analysis of various access control models and frameworks in order to demonstrate the need of self-adaptation in access control models particularly in the domain of cloud computing.