Access Control Policy Analysis and Access Denial Method for Cloud Services

Personal cloud computing is an emerging trend in the computer industry. For a sustainable service, cloud computing services must control user access. The essential business characteristics of cloud computing are payment status and service level agreement. This work proposes a novel access control method for personal cloud service business. The proposed method sets metadata, policy analysis rules, and access denying rules. Metadata define the structure of access control policies and user requirements for cloud services. The policy analysis rules are used to compare conflicts and redundancies between access control policies. The access denying rules apply policies for inhibiting inappropriate access. The ontology is a theoretical foundation of this method. In this work, ontologies for payment status, access permission, service level, and the cloud provide semantic information needed to execute rules. A scenario of personal data backup cloud service is also provided in this work. This work potentially provides cloud service providers with a convenient method of controlling user access according to changeable business and marketing strategies.