Improving the Open Stack Authentication system through federation with JASON Tokens

Abstract

Many cloud computing systems are in place for providing different kinds of services, which include AWS, AZURE, Google Cloud, etc. which are proprietary. These clouds help the users implement their own IT requirements, but the users cannot configure or customize the cloud computing processes as per their needs, especially to handle the issue of security from the perspectives of authentication, access control, and data security.Open source cloud computing systems, which include Eucalyptus, Open Nebula, open stack, etc. allows the changes carried to the cloud computing systems primarily through configuration, the addition of API, the addition of processes, etc. Users can make changes to affect the system such that it works as per the user requirements, especially to improve the security system built into the cloud computing system, which sometimes found to be vulnerable for attack. Users are concerned about the security of their software data hosted on third-party IT infrastructure. Open Stack cloud computing platform is being used by many for implementing private clouds. Users can customize open stack as per their requirements.Open stack suffers from many security-related vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the users for attacking the user software and data. A review of the Open stack systems is required to find the gaps that are existing to plug the same. In this paper, a review of the Open stack presented, bringing out different kinds of vulnerabilities that exist in authenticating the users and a federation method using JSON tokens showed that help eliminating the Vulnerabilities existing in the open stack for enforcing security within the Keystone module of Open stack.