Distributed Authentication and Authorization Models in Cloud Computing Systems: A Literature Review

Abstract

As the functionality and services provided by cloud computing increase, control access to these services becomes more complex, and more security breaches are generated. This is mainly based on the emergence of new requirements and constraints in the open, dynamic, heterogeneous, and distributed cloud environment. Despite the importance of identifying these requirements for designing and evaluating access control models, the available studies do not provide a rigorous review of these requirements and the mechanisms that fulfill them. The purpose of this study was to conduct a literature review of the published articles that have dealt with cloud access control requirements and techniques. This paper allowed us to answer the following two research questions: What cloud access control security requirements have been presented in the published literature? What access control mechanisms are proposed to fulfill them? This review yielded 21 requirements and nine mechanisms, reported by 20 manuscripts. The identified requirements in this review will help researchers, academics and practitioners assess the effectiveness of cloud access control models and identify gaps that are not addressed in the proposed solutions. In addition, this review showed the current cloud access control mechanisms used to meet these requirements such as access control based on trust, risk, multi-tenant, and attribute encryption.