Hierarchical attribute-role based access control for cloud computing

Abstract

With the rapid and wide adoption of cloud computing, data outsourcing in cloud storage is gaining attention due to its cost effectiveness, reliability and availability. However, data outsourcing introduces new data security and privacy issues, therefore access control and cryptography are essential ingredients in a cloud computing environment to assure the confidentiality of the outsourced data. Existing access control systems suffer from manual user role and role permission assignments that impose online and computational burdens on the data owner in large scale cloud systems. In this paper, a hierarchical attribute driven role based access control system is proposed, such that the user role assignments can be automatically constructed using policies applied on the attributes of users and roles. The proposed access control system consequently solves the scalability and key management problems in cloud storage systems.