Secure identity management system for federated Cloud environment

Abstract

Federated Identity Management (FIM) systems are well-known for achieving reliable and effective collaboration among various organizations. Despite numerous benefits, these systems have certain critical weaknesses such as lack of security and privacy while disseminating identity credentials (Personally Identifiable Information (PII)) across multiple federated Cloud environments. In addition to this, FIMsystems have limitations in terms of interoperability and lack compliance to international standards, since most of the systems are reliant on proprietary protocols for the exchange of identity information. In this regard, we propose a secure identity management system for federated Cloud environments that not only ensures the secure management of identity credentials, but preserves the privacy of Cloud Service Consumers (CSC) also. Furthermore, implementation of the proposed system involves state-of-the-art international standards (SCIM, SAML, REST and XACML) to ensure secure, quick and easy sharing & management of identity credentials in to, out of and around the Cloud. Further, we have performed rigorous evaluation of the proposed system using standard evaluation tools such as Scyther and JUnit. The results of our evaluation certify that the presented work ensures the desired features and level of security as expected from a secure identity management system for federated Cloud environment.