SaaS Authentication Middleware for Mobile Consumers of IaaS Cloud

Abstract

The mobile terrain is rapidly establishing itself as the reliable node for accessing cloud hosted data. Today, commodity cloud providers especially from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud expose their service APIs which facilitates the "app-ification" of enterprise workflows on mobile devices. However, these IaaS providers require the customer (i.e., the data consumer) to submit multiple security credentials which are computation intensive for the purposes of authentication and authorization. As a result, the authentication process introduces undesired delays in a mobile network when consuming enterprise data due to the increasing computational demand and the voluminous HTTP header that is transported across the wireless bandwidth.This paper introduces an application called MiLAMob that is a middleware-layer that handles the authentication process on behalf of the consumer devices in real time and with minimal HTTP traffic. The middleware currently supports mobile consumption of data on IaaS clouds such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, and MEGA. Further, the middleware employs the OAuth 2.0 technique (E.g. Facebook, Google+, and Personal Login) to identify the mobile end-user and uses security tokens to handle the tedious authentication with the IaaS cloud. Also, the deployment of the middleware enforces additional data protection because the security credentials and the IaaS abstractions are shielded from the mobile application domain and the end users.