Assisted Authoring, Analysis and Enforcement of Access Control Policies in the Cloud

The heterogeneity of cloud computing platforms hinders the proper exploitation of cloud technologies since it prevents interoperability, promotes vendor lock-in and makes it very difficult to exploit the well-engineered security mechanisms made available by cloud providers. In this paper, we introduce a technique to help developers to specify and enforce access control policies in cloud applications. The main idea is twofold. First, use a high-level specification language with a formal semantics that allows to answer access requests abstracting from an access control mechanism available in a particular cloud platform. Second, exploit an automated translation mechanism to compute (equivalent) policies that can be enforced in two of the most widely used cloud platforms: AWS and Openstack. We illustrate the technique on a running example and report our experience with a prototype implementation.