An authentication model towards cloud federation in the enterprise

  • Authors:
  • M. Noureddine;R. Bashroush

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Corporation, Seattle, USA;University of East London, London, UK

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a new paradigm which brought business opportunities as well as software engineering challenges. In The Cloud computing, business participants such as service providers, enterprise solutions, and marketplace applications are required to adopt a cloud architecture engineered for security and performance. Marketplace applications offer a great opportunity for enterprises to employ new Cloud capabilities to add value and extend business functionality. One of the major hurdles of formal adoption of Marketplace in the enterprise is performance. Enterprise applications (e.g. Lync Server, SAP, SharePoint, and Exchange Server) require a mechanism to predict and manage performance expectations. In previous research, we provided optimization for OAuth 2.0 adoption in the Enterprise. In this research, we extend the optimization to include identity federation in the Marketplace. This optimization is achieved by introducing provisioning steps to pre-establish trust amongst enterprise applications' Resource Servers, its associated Authorization Server and the clients interested in access to protected resources. We then introduce the notion of referral tokens to enable Marketplace applications federation across organizations. In this architecture, trust is provisioned and synchronized as a pre-requisite step to authentication amongst all communicating entities in OAuth protocol, and referral tokens are used to establish trust federation for Marketplace applications across organizations. A real-life case study and a simulation test were used to validate the results.