Enabling the Autonomic Management of Federated Identity Providers

The autonomic management of federated authorization infrastructures (federations) is seen as a means for improving the monitoring and use of a service provider’s resources. However, federations are comprised of independent management domains with varying scopes of control and data ownership. The focus of this paper is on the autonomic management of federated identity providers by service providers located in other domains, when the identity providers have been diagnosed as the source of abuse. In particular, we describe how an autonomic controller, external to the domain of the identity provider, exercises control over the issuing of privilege attributes. The paper presents a conceptual design and implementation of an effector for an identity provider that is capable of enabling cross-domain autonomic management. The implementation of an effector for a SimpleSAMLphp identity provider is evaluated by demonstrating how an autonomic controller, together with the effector, is capable of responding to malicious abuse

Obligations of trust for privacy and confidentiality in distributed transactions

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a bilateral symmetric approach to authorization, privacy protection and obligation enforcement in distributed transactions. The authors introduce the concept of the obligation of trust (OoT) protocol as a privacy assurance and authorization mechanism that is built upon the XACML standard. The OoT allows two communicating parties to dynamically exchange their privacy and authorization requirements and capabilities, which the authors term a notification of obligation (NoB), as well as their commitments to fulfilling each other's requirements, which the authors term signed acceptance of obligations (SAO). The authors seek to describe some applicability of these concepts and to show how they can be integrated into distributed authorization systems for stricter privacy and confidentiality control. Design/methodology/approach – Existing access control and privacy protection systems are typically unilateral and provider-centric, in that the enterprise service provider assigns the access rights, makes the access control decisions, and determines the privacy policy. There is no negotiation between the client and the service provider about which access control or privacy policy to use. The authors adopt a symmetric, more user-centric approach to privacy protection and authorization, which treats the client and service provider as peers, in which both can stipulate their requirements and capabilities, and hence negotiate terms which are equally acceptable to both parties. Findings – The authors demonstrate how the obligation of trust protocol can be used in a number of different scenarios to improve upon the mechanisms that are currently available today. Practical implications – This approach will serve to increase trust in distributed transactions since each communicating party receives a difficult to repudiate digitally signed acceptance of obligations, in a standard language (XACML), which can be automatically enforced by their respective computing machinery. Originality/value – The paper adds to current research in trust negotiation, privacy protection and authorization by combining all three together into one set of standardized protocols. Furthermore, by providing hard to repudiate signed acceptance of obligations messages, this strengthens the legal case of the injured party should a dispute arise

Managing Access to Service Providers in Federated Identity Environments: A Case Study in a Cloud Storage Service

© 2015 IEEE. Currently the diversity of services, which are adhering to Identity Federation, has raised new challenges in the area. Increasingly, service providers need to control the access to their resources by users from the federation as, even though the user is authenticated by the federation, its access to resources cannot be taken for granted. Each Service Provider (SP) of a federation implements their own access control mechanism. Moreover, SPs might need to allow different access control granularity. For instance, all users from a particular Identity Provider (IdP) may access the resources due to some financial agreement. On the other hand, it might be the case that only specific users, or groups of users, have access to the resources. This paper proposes a solution to this problem through a hierarchical authorization system. Our approach, which can be customized to different SPs, allows the SP administrator to manage which IdPs, or users, have access to the provided resources. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we present a case study in the context of a cloud storage solution

Security, user experience, acceptability attributes for the integration of physical and virtual identity access management systems

A number of systems have been developed in the recent history to provide physical and virtual identity management systems; however, most have not been very successful. Furthermore, alongside increasing the level of awareness for the need to deploy interoperable physical and virtual identity management systems, there exists an immediate need for the establishment of clear standards and guidelines for the successful integration of the two mediums. The importance and motivation for the integration of the two mediums is discussed in this paper with respect to three perspectives: Security, which includes identity; User Experience, comprising Usability; and Acceptability, containing Accessibility. Not many systems abide by such guidelines for all of these perspectives; thus, our proposed system (UbIAMS) aims to change this and provide its users with access to their services from any identity access management system rather than merely providing access to a specific set of system

A threshold secure data sharing scheme for federated clouds

Cloud computing allows users to view computing in a new direction, as it uses the existing technologies to provide better IT services at low-cost. To offer high QOS to customers according SLA, cloud services broker or cloud service provider uses individual cloud providers that work collaboratively to form a federation of clouds. It is required in applications like Real-time online interactive applications, weather research and forecasting etc., in which the data and applications are complex and distributed. In these applications secret data should be shared, so secure data sharing mechanism is required in Federated clouds to reduce the risk of data intrusion, the loss of service availability and to ensure data integrity. So In this paper we have proposed zero knowledge data sharing scheme where Trusted Cloud Authority (TCA) will control federated clouds for data sharing where the secret to be exchanged for computation is encrypted and retrieved by individual cloud at the end. Our scheme is based on the difficulty of solving the Discrete Logarithm problem (DLOG) in a finite abelian group of large prime order which is NP-Hard. So our proposed scheme provides data integrity in transit, data availability when one of host providers are not available during the computation.Comment: 8 pages, 3 Figures, International Journal of Research in Computer Science 2012. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1003.3920 by other author

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications

Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open, unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications, tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case