Contructing Authentication Web in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing enables rapid deployment of services on an on-demand basis in large scale. Public clouds are open to all users with identities from various domains, requiring the support of multiple identity providers and hybrid authentication protocols. The complexity of the authentication scenario brings a great burden to service providers. Service providers and users know only a small part of the complicated authentication network. This work explores a system view on the authentication network in cloud, allowing the authentication interaction and the trust relations to be explicitly described and analyzed. A cross-domain single sign-on model is proposed and the implementation details of the authentication architecture and protocol is presented.