Access Control for Cloud Applications

In cloud computing, cloud providers store users´ data and host users´ applications. For many cloud applications, cloud users need to share their data and applications hosted by cloud providers. Many systems use access control mechanisms to secure users´ data and applications. This paper proposed an access control scheme for cloud applications. To facilitate resource sharing, the scheme allows cloud users to delegate their access permissions to other users easily. To prevent a third party from inferring knowledge about the cloud users, the scheme uses cryptographic techniques to obscure the access control policies and users´ credentials. Data encryption is used to ensure the confidentiality of data. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme is more flexible. Experiments showed that the proposed scheme is also efficient.