MC-ABAC: An ABAC-based Model for Collaboration in Multi-Cloud Environment

Abstract

Collaborative systems allow a group of organizations to collaborate and complete shared tasks through distributed platforms. Organizations who collaborate often leverage cloud-based solutions to outsource their data and to benefit from the cloud capabilities. During such collaborations, tenants require access to and utilize resources held by other collaborating tenants, which are hosted across multiple cloud providers. Ensuring access control in a cloud-based collaborative application is a crucial problem that needs to be addressed, particularly in a multi-cloud environment. This paper presents the Multi-Cloud ABAC: MC-ABAC model, an extension of the ABAC: Attribute Based Access Control model, suitable for ensuring secure collaboration and cross-tenant access in a multi-cloud environment. The MC-ABAC introduces the notions of tenant, cloud customer and cloud service provider as fundamental entities within the model. Additionally, it incorporates multiple trust relations to enable collaboration and resource sharing among tenants in the multi-cloud environment. To demonstrate its feasibility, we have implemented the MC-ABAC model using Python technology.