A formal specification approach of Privacy-aware Attribute Based Access Control (Pa-ABAC) model for cloud computing

Abstract

The ability to share services and information between departments, partners, customers and other stakeholders of the company's ecosystem is one of the major advantages of cloud computing. The effective deployment of a cloud must be built around the secure and efficient management of user access to resources and data protection against unauthorized disclosure. The Privacy element concerned the protection of the Personal Information Identity (PII) against unauthorized disclosures, which is considered a critical requirement for many enterprises. The traditional access control models that are identity based does not support the privacy requirements and inflexible. In this paper, we propose a new model called Privacy-aware Attribute Based Access Control (Pa-ABAC), the extension of the Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) model, to express privacy requirements. Our objective is to formally specify the behavior of different elements of the proposed model in a cloud environment. This is very important to develop a valid security policy for a cloud environment free from specification errors and inconsistencies.