A Survey on Identity and Access Management for Cross-Domain Dynamic Users: Issues, Solutions, and Challenges

Access control management in a heterogeneous cloud environment, where the number of users is growing, is a daunting task for service providers. Efficiency is heavily reliant on shared resources in a modern cloud computing culture. Although data or service sharing is highly appreciated for collaborative projects, preserving identity and access management security is challenging in this context. The difficulties encountered are diverse, including a single point of failure, incompatibility, dynamic user groups, trust establishment, and revocation. Despite extensive research, certain obstacles and issues need to be addressed. In this article, challenges in access management in centralized and decentralized identity governance are grouped into different categories and accompanied by background information on the topic. Studies and implemented projects have been evaluated regarding their value and flaws. Traditional approaches, such as centralized and federated identity, as well as more futuristic methods, such as blockchain-based decentralized identity, AI/ML access management, and ABE schema, have been investigated while writing this paper. A comparative evaluation of the proposed studies has been included, where the differences and similarities can be observed.