Self-adaptive Authorisation in OpenStack Cloud Platform

Although major advances have been made in protection of cloud platforms against malicious attacks, little has been done regarding the protection of these platforms against insider threats.

OpenStack is a popular cloud platform that relies on Keystone, its identity management component, for controlling access to its resources.

Insider threats have become a major cause for concern since legitimate, though malicious, users might have access, in case of theft, to a large amount of information.

For that, we have identified and analysed several insider threats scenarios in the context of the OpenStack cloud platform, and have developed a prototype that was used for experimenting and evaluating the impact of these scenarios upon the self-adaptive authorisation system for the cloud platforms.