Authorization Policies Specification and Consistency Management within Multi-cloud Environments

Abstract

Cloud computing can be defined as a model for providing on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. In this paper we address the specification and consistency management of authorization policies in Multi-Cloud environments, where an organization may need services from more than one Cloud providers, for instance to avoid vendor lock-in. We have proposed a formal Event-Calculus based model to aggregate authorization policies from multiple Cloud providers. We have also identified and categorized the policy conflicts and proposed Event-Calculus models to reason about them. We have applied our approach on policies from AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure. Further, we have provided tool support and detailed performance evaluation results.