Towards location-aware access control and data privacy in inter-cloud communications

This paper addresses the challenging issue of supporting data privacy in hybrid cloud environments, characterised by a considerable amount of inter-cloud data exchange in the presence of multiple locations, networks, and administrative domains. To date, existing solutions do not provide a differentiated, flexible, location-aware solution to implement an access control mechanism for hybrid clouds. As sensitive data is being transferred across various administrative domains with differing data protection levels, legislations, and security mechanisms in place, it is important to enable a differentiated approach to implement flexible access control, tailored to specific circumstances. Accordingly, this paper raises awareness on the issues of data privacy in such heterogeneous cloud ecosystems, and presents an on-going research work targeted at devising an access control policy language, which would support various types of policies applicable across a wide range of hybrid cloud scenarios. As a first step towards addressing these issues, the paper introduces the concepts of location-awareness and policy transition, which will enable flexible access control based on the current location of both users and data in question.