Crowd review and attribute-based credit computation for an access control mechanism in cloud data centers

ABSTRACT

The cloud services are very useful and demanded in an information technology industry these days. Cloud services are universally delivered with the help of the internet. Cloud services provide more flexibility than conventional service methods. It is the responsibility of cloud service providers to ensure the provisioning and scaling of resources, reliability, and security of cloud resources. The cloud services witnessed exponential growth in recent years, which created many opportunities for developers but also created many security concerns. To overcome these security and legal issues, there exist various access control mechanisms. In this paper, we review the existing access control mechanism and proposed an access control framework for a cloud computing environment. The conventional access control mechanism does not fulfill the requirement of the cloud environment. The cloud environment has the diverse set of users with different sets of security requirement. It has different security concerns, namely multi-tenant hosting, heterogeneity of users, trust among the cloud components, etc. This paper proposes the innovative approach of crowd review and attribute-based credit computation for the access control mechanism in cloud data centers. In this paper, the concept of attribute-based access control is integrated with a credit component module. The concept of crowdreviewing and reputation is used to compute the credit value of users. The simulation experiment has been shown to protect the consistent users and to restrict the access of inconsistent users in the cloud environment. It is an access control approach to mitigate the challenges in security concerns.

Keywords:

• Access control
• crowd sourcing
• crowd reviewing
• credit value
• reputation
• attribute

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ajay Kumar Dubey

Ajay Kumar Dubey is research scholar in computer science department of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, Lucknow, India. He received his BE (CSE) from Dr B.R. Ambedkar University Agra, India in 2002 and ME (CSE) from Panjab University Chandigarh, India in 2009. His research interest mainly includes performance optimization of cloud application, trust and cloud security. He has published ten papers in national and international journals and conferences.

Vimal Mishra

Dr Vimal Mishra is director of Institute of Engineering and Rural Technology (I.E.R.T.), Prayagraj, India. He received his BTech and MTech degree from Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur, India in 1991 and 2002 respectively. He received PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi, India in 2010. He has guided many PhD and MTech theses in Computer Engineering. His research interest includes Machine Translation, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning etc. He has published more than fifty (50) peer reviewed research articles in national and international journals. He has published three books and 2 book chapters. He is also an editorial board member of International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering, Inderscience publications.