An Overview of Cloud Identity Management-Models
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An Overview of Cloud Identity Management-Models Bernd Zwattendorfer, Thomas Zefferer and Klaus Stranacher Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK), Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16a, 8010 Graz, Austria fbernd.zwattendorfer, thomas.zefferer, [email protected] Keywords: Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Identity Management-Model, Identity Management Abstract: Unique identification and secure authentication are essential processes in various areas of application, e.g. in e-Government, e-Health, or e-Business. During the past years several identity management-systems and models have evolved. Many organizations and enterprises or even countries for their national eID solutions rely on identity management-systems for securing their applications. Since more and more applications are migrated into the cloud, secure identification and authentication are also vital in the cloud domain. How- ever, cloud identity management-systems need to meet slightly different requirements than traditional identity management-systems and thus cannot be clustered into the same model types or categories. Therefore, in this paper we give an overview of different cloud identity management-models that have already emerged up to now. We further compare these models based on selected criteria, e.g. on practicability and privacy aspects. 1 INTRODUCTION cloud computing is the loss of data protection and privacy (Pearson and Benameur, 2010), (Zissis and Secure and reliable identity management (IdM) plays Lekkas, 2012), and (Sen, 2013). a vital role in several security-sensitive areas of ap- The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 plications, e.g. in e-Government, e-Business, or classifies existing traditional identity management- e-Health. An identity management-system helps models and their implementations. Section 3 surveys online applications to control access for users to existing cloud identity management-models and de- protected resources or services. However, identity scribes their benefits and drawbacks. These models management is no new topic and several identity are compared in Section 4 based on selected criteria. management-approaches and systems have already Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 5. emerged over time. A comprehensive overview on identity management-systems is given in (Bauer et al., 2005). Due to the increasing number of cloud comput- 2 TRADITIONAL IDENTITY ing adoption and the deployment of security-sensitive MANAGEMENT-MODELS cloud applications, secure identity management be- comes also more and more important in the cloud do- An identity management-system usually involves four main. In addition, outsourcing identity management- entities (Bertino and Takahashi, 2011). A service systems to the cloud can bring up several benefits provider (SP) provides different online services to such as higher scalability or cost savings, since no users. Before being allowed to consume such ser- in-house infrastructure needs to be hosted and main- vices, a user has to successfully identify and authen- tained. However, the field of cloud identity manage- ticate. Therefore, the user usually identifies and au- ment is still new and not extensively investigated yet. thenticates at a so-called identity provider (IdP). The Therefore, the aim of this paper is to overview dif- identity provider is then in charge of providing the ferent cloud identity management-models, discuss ad- users identity data and supplementary authentication vantages and disadvantages of the individual models, results to the service provider in a secure way. Fi- provide a comprehensive survey, and finally compare nally, a control party, which is usually a law or regula- them based on selected criteria. The criteria for the tion enforcing body, needs to investigate identity data comparison have been selected by focusing on practi- transactions, e.g. for data protection reasons. Hence, cability and privacy, since one of the main issues of main purpose of such control party is auditing. Figure 1 illustrates the communication process in an identity 2.2 Central Model management-system including all four entities. The central identity model avoids diverse identity management-systems, where the user has to register separately. Instead, the identity management-system is outsourced by several service providers to a central identity provider. The identity provider takes over all identity-related functionality for the service provider, including credential issuance, identification and au- thentication, and the management of the identity life- cycle in general (Bertino and Takahashi, 2011). Fur- thermore, in this model users’ identity data are stored in a central repository at the identity provider and ser- vice providers do not need to maintain identity data in their own repositories (Cao and Yang, 2010). For authentication at a service provider, the user has to identify and authenticate at the identity provider be- fore. The identity provider then assembles a token Figure 1: Entities involved in an identity management- including all necessary identity and authentication in- system formation of the user and transmits it to the service provider1. (Jøsang et al., 2005) further distinguish the Over time, several identity models involving these domain model for the identifier used. In the common four entities and supporting similar but slightly dif- identifier model one and the same identifier is used ferent use cases have evolved. Some of these mod- for identification at all service providers. In contrast els have advantages in scalability, others in privacy or to that, in the meta identifier domain model separate user control. In the following subsections we briefly identifiers are used for identification at the individ- describe the most important models based on the work ual service providers. However, all separate identi- of (Cao and Yang, 2010), (Dabrowski and Pacyna, fiers map to a common meta identifier at the identity 2008), (Dbrowski and Pacyna, 2008), (Jøsang et al., provider to uniquely identify the user. Typical exam- 2005), (Jøsang and Pope, 2005), (Jøsang et al., 2007), ples implementing this approach are Kerberos (Neu- and (Palfrey and Gasser, 2007). For simplicity, we man et al., 2005) or the Central Authentication Ser- skip a discussion of the control party in all subsequent vice (CAS)2. models because its functionality remains the same in all models. 2.3 User-Centric Model 2.1 Isolated Model While in the central model all identity data of the user The isolated model is basically the simplest tradi- are stored in the domain of the identity provider, in the user-centric model tional identity model. In this model, the service all identity data are stored directly provider and identity provider merge, hence identi- in the users domain, e.g. on a secure token such as a fication and authentication are directly carried out at smart card. The main advantage of this model is that the service provider. In addition, the functionality of the user always remains the owner of her identity data the identity management-system (creating, maintain- and stays under their full control (Dbrowski and Pa- ing, or deleting identities) can only be used by this cyna, 2008). Identity data can only be transferred by specific service provider. If a user wants to access ser- an identity provider to a service provider if the user vices of another service provider, she needs to register explicitly gives her consent to do so. Compared to at the other service providers identity management- the central model, this tremendously increases users’ system again. This further means that each individual privacy. (Jøsang and Pope, 2005) discuss in detail this user-centric approach. Typical examples imple- service provider has to store and maintain the identity 3 data and credentials of the user separately. While this menting this model are Windows CardSpace or var- still may not be a huge burden for service providers, 1Different approaches exist; hence identity data can be the diversity of credentials for accessing various ser- either pushed to or pulled from the service provider. vice providers may become unmanageable for users 2http://www.jasig.org/cas (Jøsang and Pope, 2005). This model can still be 3http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ found by service providers on the Internet. vstudio/ms733090\%28v\=vs.90\%29.aspx ious national eID solutions such as the Austrian cit- 3.1 Identity in the Cloud-Model izen card (Leitold et al., 2002) or the German eID (Frommm and Hoepner, 2011). The Identity in the Cloud-Model is similar to the iso- lated identity model described in Section 2.1. Again, 2.4 Federated Model identity provider and service provider merge also in this model. This means for the cloud case that the In the federated model identity data are not stored in cloud service provider, which hosts the application, is a central repository but are rather stored distributed also responsible for the identity management. Figure across different identity and/or service providers. No 2 illustrates this model. single entity is fully controlling the identity informa- tion (Palfrey and Gasser, 2007). The distributed iden- tity data of a particular user are linked usually by the help of a common identifier4. All identity providers and service providers, which take part in such a fed- eration, share a common trust relationship amongst each other. The trust relationship is usually estab- lished on organizational level whereas enforcement is carried out on technical level. This