Security and Cloud Computing: InterCloud Identity Management Infrastructure

Cloud Computing is becoming one of the most important topics in the IT world. Several challenges are being raised from the adoption of this computational paradigm including security, privacy, and federation. This paper aims to introduce new concepts in cloud computing and security, focusing on heterogeneous and federated scenarios. We present a reference architecture able to address the Identity Management (IdM) problem in the InterCloud context and show how it can be successfully applied to manage the authentication needed among clouds for the federation establishment.