Securing Cloud Users at Runtime via a Market Mechanism: A Case for Federated Identity

Securing users in the federated cloud environment is a challenging problem. We motivate the need for a dynamic and adaptive framework for securing identities at runtime. The solution explores the link between Identity Security Goals, the features they require (e.g. Anonymity, Integrity) and the provisioned underlying computational resources (e.g. Memory, CPU) in federated environments. We report on an economics inspired approach, which utilizes an auction procedure for dynamic allocation of resources for adaptively securing identities at runtime. The solution is realized as a simulation and tested on the cloud specific area of federated identity management.