An Efficient Heuristic-Based Role Mapping Framework for Secure and Fair Collaboration in SaaS Cloud

Online collaboration has become one of the popular services provided by present day SaaS clouds. It facilitates sharing and accessing information among multiple collaborating domains from remote locations. Owing to loosely-coupled nature of such collaborations, access requests from remote user are made in form of a set of permissions. Provider domain maps these permissions into a set of local roles to facilitate collaboration. Mapping the requested permissions into appropriate roles is nontrivial and has been identified as the inter-domain role mapping (IDRM) problem. Two variants of the IDRM problem, viz., the IDRM-safety and the IDRM-availability address the security and fairness issues in a multi-system collaboration, respectively. In this work, we propose a distributed framework which enables any collaborating domain to map a given set of access requests into a set of roles, through implementing a novel heuristic that provides better solution to the IDRM-availability problem. Results establish efficacy of the proposed approach in comparison to the reported ones. The proposed framework is observed to be efficient in terms of response time, thus, addressing the scalability requirement of cloud-based services.