Authorization Management in Multi-cloud Collaboration Using Attribute-Based Access Control

Security in multi-cloud collaborative environment requires a fine-grained access control mechanism. Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) is considered to be a suitable choice in such situations. However, identification of a correct set of ABAC rules is a crucial step in establishing secure collaborations among multiple clouds. In this paper, we formally define cross-domain rule mining as the problem of finding a minimal set of ABAC rules that allow access to the resources of one cloud by the users of another cloud. The problem is shown to be NP-Hard and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve it. Experiments on an extensive set of benchmark and synthetic data show encouraging results.