A Multi-level Policy Engine to Manage Identities and Control Accesses in Cloud Computing Environment

Security challenges are the most important obstacles for the advancement of IT-based on-demand services and cloud computing as an emerging technology. Lack of coincidence in identity management models based on defined policies and various security levels in different cloud servers is one of the most challenging issues in clouds. In this paper, a policy-based user authentication model has been presented to provide a reliable and scalable identity management and to map cloud users’ access requests with defined polices of cloud servers. In the proposed schema several components are provided to define access policies by cloud servers, to apply policies based on a structural and reliable ontology, to manage user identities and to semantically map access requests by cloud users with defined polices.