A Secure Identity Management System for Secure Mobile Cloud Computing

안전한 모바일 클라우드 컴퓨팅을 위한 ID 관리 시스템

Cloud computing is an up-and-coming paradigm shift transforming computing models from a technology to a utility. However, security concerns related to privacy, confidentiality and trust are among the issues that threaten the wide deployment of cloud computing. With the advancement of ubiquitous mobile-based clients, the ubiquity of the model suggests a higher integration in our day to day life and this leads to a rise in security issues. To strengthen the access control of cloud resources, most organizations are acquiring Identity Management Systems (IDM). This paper presents one of the most popular IDM systems, specifically OAuth, working in the scope of Mobile Cloud Computing which has many weaknesses in its protocol flow. OAuth is a Delegated Authorization protocol, and not an Authentication protocol and this is where the problem lies. This could lead to very poor security decisions around authentication when the basic OAuth flow is adhered to. OAuth provides an access token to a client, so that it can access a protected resource, based on the permission of the resource owner. Many researchers have opted to implement OpenlD alongside OAuth so as to solve this problem. But OpenlD similarly has several security flows. This paper presents scenarios of how insecure implementations of OAuth can be abused maliciously. We incorporate an authentication protocol to verify the identities before authorization is carried out.