Adding Federated Identity Management to OpenStack

Abstract

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing project that is enjoying wide. While many cloud deployments may be stand-alone, it is clear that secure federated community clouds, i.e., inter-clouds, are needed. Hence, there must be methods for federated identity management (FIM) that enable authentication and authorisation to be flexibly enforced across federated environments. Since there are many different FIM protocols either in use or in development today, this paper addresses the goal of adding protocol independent federated identity management to the OpenStack services. After giving a motivating example for secure cloud federation, and describing the conceptual design for protocol independent federated access, a detailed federated identity protocol sequence is presented. The paper then describes the implementation of the protocol independent system components, along with the incorporation of two different FIM protocols, namely SAML and Keystone proprietary. Finally performance measurements of the protocol independent components, and the two different protocols dependent components are presented, before the paper concludes with the current limitations. © 2013 The Author(s).