A Secure Mobile Cloud Identity: Criteria for Effective Identity and Access Management Standards

Managing digital identities and access control for cloud users and applications remains one of the greatest challenges facing cloud computing today. This led to a new cloud security service paradigm called identity and access management (IAM) service, IDentity-as-a-Service (IDaaS). Many IAM standards have been proposed in the last two decades: Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Central Authentication Service (CAS), OZ Protocol, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), CoSign Protocol, Open Authentication (OAuth), and OpenID Connect (OIDC). However, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) IAM requirements are somewhat different due to its resource limitations and mobile communication. It may not be necessary that the same IAM standards are equally effective for MCC. To determine the appropriateness of these IAM standards for MCC requires some IAM performance evaluation criteria. Therefore, this paper proposes several evaluation criteria for an effective IAM standard for MCC.