Design Issues of Role-Based Multi-Tenancy Access Control in Cloud Computing Services

Multi-tenancy control is one of the most key issues of core technologies in cloud computing services. That is, many users can access different applications and resources under the cloud computing environment where many tenants use the databases and applications simultaneously; the amount of data is usually very huge and time-consuming. In this paper, we utilize identity management and role-based access control to propose a new scheme under multitenant cloud computing services, called RB-MTAC. The RB-MTAC can make various users have designated roles, and different roles have respective functions and permissions in cloud services. To be compared with the existing UBAC system, RB-MTAC has average improvement ratios in response time of 46.3%, throughput of 7.2%, and data overhead of 17%. When the cloud users has more than one thousand users, the RBMTAC can get better response time and higher throughput and also lower data overhead to make the multi-tenancy access control system more effective and efficient on the cloud. The cost of computing resources can also be saved when multi-tenant's database is shared, but more attentions should be paid on the secure cloud-based system design and relevant privacy issues. In the future, the proposed RB-MTAC will be employed in various cloud computing service models under cloud MTA environment.