Anonymous Authentication with a Bi-directional Identity Federation in the Cloud

摘要

Cloud technology offers a completely new set of benefits and savings in terms of computational, storage, bandwidth and transmission costs to its users. In the cloud architecture, user space may be shared across various resources, leading to possible data exposure, and making mapping of users and their privileges a challenging job. Moreover the user has to keep track of many passwords and tokens for different applications. In many setting, anonymity of users accessing some or all services provides in this architecture also need to be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional federated identity management scheme that allows for anonymous authentication of users. Our proposed scheme is applicable to any combination of horizontal and vertical federations, across multiple cloud layers.