User-Controlled Identity Provisioning for Secure Account Sharing

Abstract

Clouds have the potentials to facilitate resource sharing for collaborations among different organizations or individuals. In this paper, we realise that the identity management scheme in current clouds is not very convenient for users to collaborate over clouds. This inconvenience is caused by the requirement to users who in order to access privately shared resources in clouds must register into the clouds, but might be reluctant to register. To address this inconvenience, we propose a user-controlled identity provisioning mechanism, by which a registered user can create local identities for collaborators to share the resources in his account, and using the local identities, collaborators can access the privately shared resources without being required to register. We demonstrate our mechanism by implementing a prototype. We believe our mechanism can benefit current clouds to improve their sharing services.