Design and implementation of a cloud-based assured information sharing system

Abstract

The advent of cloud computing and the continuing movement toward software as a service (SaaS) paradigms have posed an increasing need for assured information sharing (AIS) as a service in the cloud. This paper describes the first of its kind assured information sharing system that operates in a cloud. The idea is for each organization to store their data and the information sharing policies in a cloud. The information is shared according to the policies. We describe a cloud-based information sharing framework that utilizes Semantic Web technologies; our framework consists of a policy engine that reasons about the policies for information sharing purposes and a secure data engine that stores and queries data in the cloud. We also describe the operation of our system with example policies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.