C-ABAC: An ABAC based Model for Collaboration in Multi-tenant Environment

Abstract

Collaborative systems allow a group of users to collaborate through distributed platforms in order to perform a common task. Collaborators usually use cloud-based solutions to outsource their data and to benefit from the cloud capabilities. Ensuring access control in a cloud-based collaborative session is an important problem that should be addressed, especially in a multi-tenant configuration. In this paper, we present C-ABAC, a Collaboration Attributes Based Access Control model that ensures access control in multi-tenant cloud environments. C-ABAC supports the workflow concept, preserves the tenants autonomy in defining their local policies and preserves the confidentiality of the object attributes. The implementation of C-ABAC in the SwiftStack environment demonstrates the feasibility of the suggested model.