Integral Federated Identity Management for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing environments may offer different levels of abstraction to its users. Federated identity management, though, does not leverage these abstractions; each user must set up her identity management solution. This situation is further aggravated by the fact that no identity federation solution is able to integrate all abstraction layers (i.e. IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). On this paper we describe a new architecture offering integral federated identity management, to support multi-domain clients in a multi-provider environment. We also present some implementation details. The proposed architecture offers significant advantages over current offerings: it eases identity management without losing flexibility, offers better user tracking through the whole cloud computing layers, and enables the implementation of multi-provider environments through account data replication.