Strengthen cloud computing security with federal identity management using hierarchical identity-based cryptography

Abstract

More and more companies begin to provide different kinds of cloud computing services for Internet users at the same time these services also bring some security problems. Currently the majority of cloud computing systems provide digital identity for users to access their services, this will bring some inconvenience for a hybrid cloud that includes multiple private clouds and/or public clouds. Today most cloud computing system use asymmetric and traditional public key cryptography to provide data security and mutual authentication. Identity-based cryptography has some attraction characteristics that seem to fit well the requirements of cloud computing. In this paper, by adopting federated identity management together with hierarchical identity-based cryptography (HIBC), not only the key distribution but also the mutual authentication can be simplified in the cloud. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.