Abstract:
This document is the final formal deliverable for our Final Year Project titled ‘Fine Grained Access Control Model for Cloud Based Applications’.
Cloud computing is an emerging field although it provides the advantages of scalability, flexibility, and accessibility, but organizations are reluctant to embrace this emerging technology due to several security concerns, Access Control being one of them. Extensible Access Control Framework aims towards providing a customizable access control framework for Cloud hosted applications in order to provide authorized access to data & resources. Fine Grained Access Control (FGAC) Model is one of the provided models in this framework which allows organizations to apply different level of restrictions on an object for different access requests. FGAC works on smaller items, bringing granularity to the policies, granularity can apply to the information being considered for access control.
The project aims at providing a user friendly FGAC system that can be used by the organizations to create, manage and evaluate access control policies without getting into the complexities of the cloud infrastructure and model. Basically, the system uses eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, XACML, an OASIS standard, to manage policies.
For development and testing of the application, latest versions of Java EE, hibernate, MySql, Primefaces, SAML, JUnit and DSpace are being used. The implementation has been tested by integrating it with DSpace, a digital content repository.
