An Access Control Model for Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud Computing is a distributed computing paradigm which allows the users to access the services and shared resources hosted by the various service providers, to meet their services or resources requirements. In order to prevent the unauthorized or illegal access of the cloud resources, authentication of the requesting users and the authorization of their access privileges are extremely important. The access control of distributed resources is most important in securing the cloud scenario. In this paper, we analyze the various access control mechanisms adopted in the distributed computing domain, considering their pros and cons. We propose an architecture for the Distributed Access Control (DAC) in the Cloud Computing paradigm, taking into account the access control requirements of the cloud service providers and consumers. We also give the workflow model for the proposed access control architecture. A few open issues in the area of DAC are also discussed in this paper.