Optimal Rule Mining for Dynamic Authorization Management in Collaborating Clouds Using Attribute-Based Access Control
Applications that span across multiple clouds are often found to be vulnerable to security threats. Such highly heterogeneous environments need a fine-grained access control mechanism like Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) for enforcing security. A first step towards successfully deploying ABAC is to define an appropriate set of access control rules that establish the desired inter-cloud accesses. This becomes more challenging when the access requirements vary with time or the users and objects are updated quite frequently. We study the problem of formulation of an optimal set of ABAC rules for granting inter-cloud accesses in a dynamic environment. The problem being NP-Hard, we propose heuristic solutions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show encouraging results.