Design and Implementation of an Attribute Based Access Controller using OpenStack Services

Sharad Dixit, Graduate Student, UMBC
10:30am Monday, 24 September 2018, ITE346

With the advent of cloud computing, industries began a paradigm shift from the traditional way of computing towards cloud computing as it fulfilled organizations present requirements such as on-demand resource allocation, lower capital expenditure, scalability and flexibility but with that it brought a variety of security and user data breach issues. To solve the issues of user data and security breach, organizations have started to implement hybrid cloud where underlying cloud infrastructure is set by the organization and is accessible from anywhere around the world because of the distinguishable security edges provided by it. However, most of the cloud platforms provide a Role Based Access Controller which does not adequate for complex organizational structures. A novel mechanism is proposed using OpenStack services and semantic web technologies to develop a module which evaluates user’s and project’s multi-varied attributes and run them against access policy rules defined by an organization before granting the access to the user. Henceforth, an organization can deploy our module to obtain a robust and trustworthy access control based on multiple attributes of a user and the project the user has requested in a hybrid cloud platform like OpenStack.