Agent-based approach for distributed access control in cloud environments

Recently, considerable attention has been given to the emerging cloud computing paradigm in the distributed computing environments where, users access various services and shared resources hosted by the service providers, for the successful and efficient completion of their tasks. In this context, in order to prevent the unauthorized access of the distributed system components, authentication and authorization functions are to be enforced effectively. Hence, the proper access control of distributed shared resources assumes high significance, as far as the secure computing paradigm is concerned. In this paper, we make an analysis of the distributed access control issue considering the various mechanisms proposed by the researchers in this area, discussing their merits and demerits. The issues and concerns in different contexts of distributed computing environments are highlighted. We propose an agent-based approach for the distributed access control in cloud environments for mediating the access requests of cloud consumers, considering the present day requirements of the cloud computing paradigm. We also give the workflow model for the proposed agent-based approach for the distributed access control in cloud. A few open issues in the area of distributed access control are also discussed.