Protection of Identity Information in Cloud Computing without Trusted Third Party

Abstract

Cloud computing allows the use of Internet-based services to support business processes and rental of IT-services on a utility-like basis. It offers a concentration of resources but also poses risks for data privacy. A single breach can cause significant loss. The heterogeneity of “users” represents a danger of multiple, collaborative threats. In cloud computing, entities may have multiple accounts associated with a single or multiple service providers (SPs). Sharing sensitive identity information (that is, Personally Identifiable information or PII) along with associated attributes of the same entity across services can lead to mapping of the identities to the entity, tantamount to privacy loss. Identity management (IDM) is one of the core components in cloud privacy and security and can help alleviate some of the problems associated with cloud computing. Available solutions use trusted third party (TTP) in identifying entities to SPs. The solution providers do not recommend the usage of their solutions on untrusted hosts. We propose an approach for IDM, which is independent of TTP and has the ability to use identity data on untrusted hosts. The approach is based on the use of predicates over encrypted data and multi-party computing for negotiating a use of a cloud service. It uses active bundle—which is a middleware agent that includes PII data, privacy policies, a virtual machine that enforces the policies, and has a set of protection mechanisms to protect itself. An active bundle interacts on behalf of a user to authenticate to cloud services using user’s privacy policies.