A Federative Access Control in a Cloud Environment with a Publish/Subscribe Protocol

Abstract

Cloudcomputing is a new concept that has interesting advantages; high computingperformances provided as needed, much lower cost than in-house infrastructures,and better reliability and scalability. However, with some drawbacks that areimpeding its adoption, security is so far the most alarming concern forcompanies or organizations. Access control policies, for example, are the mostchallenging issue that has been tackled these last years; to ensure that theright user is accessing the right resources in such a distributed, virtual andscalable environment handled by a third party, to manage an access request to ashared resource from heterogeneous entities following different policies. Inthis study, the authors aim to overcome this issue by implementing an accesscontrol architecture enabling access to the shared data for collaboratingorganizations. They propose a model supplied with an ontology database describing the whole environment to control access toa publish/subscribe messaging protocol; which capitalizes on the advantagesprovided by innovative techniques such as Semantic Web technologies and thepublish/subscribe protocol. Semantic Web technologies provide dynamism andscalability for this model thanks to its SWRL inference engine while thepublish/subscribe protocol, in this case, MQTT, which is a light-couplingprotocol simplifies the traffic between the different actors involved.