General Access Control Guidance for Cloud Systems

Executive Summary

Cloud systems have been developed over time and conceptualized through a combination of software, hardware components, and virtualization technologies. Characteristics of the cloud, such as resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and pay-as-you-go services, accelerated its wide adoption by industry, government, and academia. Specifically, cloud systems offer application services, data storage, data management, networking, and computing resources management to consumers over a network (the internet in general). Despite the great advancements of cloud systems, concerns have been raised about the offered level of security and privacy. The importance of these concerns becomes more evident when considering the increasing number of users who have adopted cloud services.

This document presents cloud access control (AC) characteristics and a set of general access control guidance for cloud service models—IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). The main focus is on technical aspects of access control without considering deployment models (e.g., public, private, hybrid clouds etc.), as well as trust and risk management issues, which require different layers of discussions that depend on the security requirements of the business function or the organization of deployment for which the cloud system is implemented. Different service delivery models need to consider managing different types of access on offered service components. Such considerations can be hierarchical, such as how the access control considerations of functional components in a lower-level service model (e.g., networking and storage layers in the IaaS model) are also applicable to the same functional components in a higher-level service model (e.g., networking and storage in PaaS and SaaS models). In general, access control considerations for IaaS are also applicable to PaaS and SaaS, and access control considerations for IaaS and PaaS are also applicable to SaaS. Therefore, AC guidance for IaaS is applicable to PaaS and SaaS, and AC guidance for IaaS and PaaS is also applicable to SaaS. However,