Enhancing Access-Control with Risk-Metrics for Collaboration on Social Cloud-Platforms

Abstract

Cloud computing promotes the exchange of information, resources and tasks between different organizations by facilitating the deployment and adoption of centralized collaboration platforms: Professional Social Networking (PSN). However, issues concerning security management are preventing their widespread use, as organizations still need to protect some of their sensitive data. Traditional access control policies, defined over the triplet (User, Action, Resource) are difficult to put in place in such highly dynamic environments. In this paper, we introduce risk metrics in existing access control systems to combine the fine-grained policies defined at the user level, with a global risk-policy defined at the organization's level. Experiments show the impact of our approach when deployed on traditional systems.