Volume 11, Number 03, March 2021

Best Practices in Designing and Implementing Cloud Authentication Schemes

  Authors

Zhihao Zheng, Yao Zhang, Vinay Gurram, Jose Salazar Useche, Isabella Roth and Yi Hu, Northern Kentucky University, USA

  Abstract

At present, the development and innovation in any business/engineering field are inseparable from the computer and network infrastructure that supports the core business. The world has been turning into an era of rapid development of information technology. Every year, there are more individuals and companies that start using cloud storages and other cloud services for computing and information storage. Therefore, the security of sensitive information in cloud becomes a very important challenge that needs to be addressed. The cloud authentication is a special form of authentication for today’s enterprise IT infrastructure. Cloud applications communicate with the LDAP server which could be an on-premises directory server or an identity management service running on cloud. Due to the complex nature of cloud authentication, an effective and fast authentication scheme is required for successful cloud applications. In this study, we designed several cloud authorization schemes to integrate an onpremises or cloud-based directory service with a cloud application. We also discussed the pros and cons of different approaches to illustrate the best practices on this topic.

  Keywords

Cloud Application Authentication, Identity Management in Cloud, IAM.