A multi-level authorization based tenant separation mechanism in cloud computing environment

Separation issue is one of the most important problems about cloud computing security. Tenants should be separated from each other based on cloud infrastructure and different users from one tenant should be separated from each other with the constraint of security policies. Learning from the notion of trusted cloud computing and trustworthiness in cloud, in this paper, a multi-level authorization separation model is formally described, and a series of rules are proposed to summarize the separation property of this model. The correctness of the rules is proved. Furthermore, based on this model, a tenant separation mechanism is deployed in a real world mixed-critical information system. Performance benchmarks have shown the availability and efficiency of this mechanism.