XBAC: A Unified Access Control Model for Heterogeneous Multi-Tenancy Cloud Environments
Meryeme Ayache, Amjad Gawanmeh, Jamal Nazzal Al-Karaki · 2019
Cloud computing provides organizations with computing resources featuring easy deployment, connectivity, configuration and scalability. Multi-tenancy permits cloud providers to establish collaborative relationships among cloud users, especially at the storage service level. To satisfy security requirements among collaborating tenants, each tenant may define a set of access control policies to secure access to its shared data. However, tenants may enforce their policies using heterogeneous access control models (e.g RBAC and ABAC), which may be difficult to manage by cloud providers. Hence, There is a need of a cloud system that acts as an intermediary access control model in order to resolve the heterogeneous structure of other models. This paper presents a novel unified access control model for heterogeneous multi-tenancy architectures in the cloud environment. This model, called XBAC, can manage heterogeneous access control policies. The proposed model uses a learning automata to represent access policies and requests. XBAC is integrated in the cloud environment using a cloud broker. In addition, the paper defines a basic architecture that defines the interaction between the main components of heterogeneous cloud systems. Initial simulation results show that the proposed model meets the requirements of the heterogeneous access models environment, by preventing access of unauthorized users to the resources of multi-tenancy cloud services.