AccAuth: Accounting system for OAuth protocol

Abstract

When a user accesses a resource, the accounting process at the server side does the job of keeping track of the resource usage so as to charge the user. In cloud computing, a user may use more than one service provider and need two independent service providers to work together. In this user-centric context, the user is the owner of the information and has the right to authorize to a third party application to access the protected resource on the user's behalf. Therefore, the user also needs to monitor the authorized resource usage he granted to third party applications. However, the existing accounting protocols were proposed to monitor the resource usage in terms of how the user uses the resource from the service provider. This paper proposed the user-centric accounting model called AccAuth which designs an accounting layer to an OAuth protocol. Then the prototype was implemented, and the proposed model was evaluated against the standard requirements. The result showed that AccAuth passed all the requirements.