A novel access control model for cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud Computing is the fast growing and the dominant field of Information Technology (IT) industry. It proposes on demand and cost effective services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Many security challenges are drawn from these services in cloud environment such as abuse of cloud services, data security, malicious insider and cyber-attacks. Although various access control policies and models such as Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) are existing, but these are not suitable for Cloud access control requirements. In this paper, we analyze and identify different important gaps of the conventional access control schemes based on the their demerits and cloud access requirements. We also propose a Combinatorial Batch Codes Based Access Control (CBCBAC) model, which fulfill all the cloud access control requirements. Our approach ensures the secure and efficient sharing of resources among various non-trusted tenants and also has the capacity to support different access permission to the same user for using multiple services securely. We also implement a prototype of our work which depicts the effective access control in the cloud environment. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.