A Scalable Model for Secure Multiparty Authentication

Distributed system architectures such as cloud computing or the emergent architectures of the Internet Of Things, present significant challenges for security and privacy. Specifically, in a complex application there is a need to securely delegate access control mechanisms to one or more parties, who in turn can govern methods that enable multiple other parties to be authenticated in relation to the services that they wish to consume. We identify shortcomings in an existing proposal by Xu et al for multiparty authentication and evaluate a novel model from Al-Aqrabi et al that has been designed specifically for complex multiple security realm environments. The adoption of a Session Authority Cloud ensures that resources for authentication requests are scalable, whilst permitting the necessary architectural abstraction for myriad hardware IoT devices such as actuators and sensor networks, etc. In addition, the ability to ensure that session credentials are confirmed with the relevant resource principles means that the essential rigour for multiparty authentication is established

Dynamic Multiparty Authentication of Data Analytics Services within Cloud Environments

Business analytics processes are often composed from orchestrated, collaborating services, which are consumed by users from multiple cloud systems (in different security realms), which need to be engaged dynamically at runtime. If heterogeneous cloud systems located in different security realms do not have direct authentication relationships, then it is a considerable technical challenge to enable secure collaboration. In order to address this security challenge, a new authentication framework is required to establish trust amongst business analytics service instances and users by distributing a common session secret to all participants of a session. We address this challenge by designing and implementing a secure multiparty authentication framework for dynamic interaction, for the scenario where members of different security realms express a need to access orchestrated services. This novel framework exploits the relationship of trust between session members in different security realms, to enable a user to obtain security credentials that access cloud resources in a remote realm. The mechanism assists cloud session users to authenticate their session membership, thereby improving the performance of authentication processes within multiparty sessions. We see applicability of this framework beyond multiple cloud infrastructure, to that of any scenario where multiple security realms has the potential to exist, such as the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).Comment: Submitted to the 20th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications 2018 (HPCC2018), 28-30 June 2018, Exeter, U

Cloud BI: A Multi-party Authentication Framework for Securing Business Intelligence on the Cloud

Business intelligence (BI) has emerged as a key technology to be hosted on Cloud computing. BI offers a method to analyse data thereby enabling informed decision making to improve business performance and profitability. However, within the shared domains of Cloud computing, BI is exposed to increased security and privacy threats because an unauthorised user may be able to gain access to highly sensitive, consolidated business information. The business process contains collaborating services and users from multiple Cloud systems in different security realms which need to be engaged dynamically at runtime. If the heterogamous Cloud systems located in different security realms do not have direct authentication relationships then it is technically difficult to enable a secure collaboration. In order to address these security challenges, a new authentication framework is required to establish certain trust relationships among these BI service instances and users by distributing a common session secret to all participants of a session. The author addresses this challenge by designing and implementing a multiparty authentication framework for dynamic secure interactions when members of different security realms want to access services. The framework takes advantage of the trust relationship between session members in different security realms to enable a user to obtain security credentials to access Cloud resources in a remote realm. This mechanism can help Cloud session users authenticate their session membership to improve the authentication processes within multi-party sessions. The correctness of the proposed framework has been verified by using BAN Logics. The performance and the overhead have been evaluated via simulation in a dynamic environment. A prototype authentication system has been designed, implemented and tested based on the proposed framework. The research concludes that the proposed framework and its supporting protocols are an effective functional basis for practical implementation testing, as it achieves good scalability and imposes only minimal performance overhead which is comparable with other state-of-art methods

Cloud BI: Future of business intelligence in the Cloud

In self-hosted environments it was feared that business intelligence (BI) will eventually face a resource crunch situation due to the never ending expansion of data warehouses and the online analytical processing (OLAP) demands on the underlying networking. Cloud computing has instigated a new hope for future prospects of BI. However, how will BI be implemented on Cloud and how will the traffic and demand profile look like? This research attempts to answer these key questions in regards to taking BI to the Cloud. The Cloud hosting of BI has been demonstrated with the help of a simulation on OPNET comprising a Cloud model with multiple OLAP application servers applying parallel query loads on an array of servers hosting relational databases. The simulation results reflected that extensible parallel processing of database servers on the Cloud can efficiently process OLAP application demands on Cloud computing