Dynamic Multiparty Authentication of Data Analytics Services within Cloud Environments

Approaches to the provision of data analytics for businesses offer methods to analyse and model data, enabling informed decision making to improve business performance and profitability. Typically, analytics processing is an intensive task and the demand for business insight, on-demand, means that organisations make use of elastic cloud provisioned resources to host such services. However, within the shared domains of multi-tenant cloud computing, business data and models are exposed to greater security threats and compromised privacy, since an unauthorised user may be able to gain access to highly sensitive, consolidated business-critical information. Business analytics processes are often composed from orchestrated, collaborating services, which are consumed by users from multiple cloud systems (in different security realms), which need to be engaged dynamically at runtime. If heterogeneous cloud systems located in different security realms do not have direct authentication relationships, then it is a considerable technical challenge to enable secure collaboration. In order to address this security challenge, a new authentication framework is required to establish trust amongst business analytics service instances and users by distributing a common session secret to all participants of a session. We address this challenge by designing and implementing a secure multiparty authentication framework for dynamic interaction, for the scenario where members of different security realms express a need to access orchestrated services. This novel framework exploits the relationship of trust between session members in different security realms, to enable a user to obtain security credentials that access cloud resources in a remote realm. The mechanism assists cloud session users to authenticate their session membership, thereby improving the performance of authentication processes within multiparty sessions. We see applicability of this framework beyond multiple cloud infrastructure, to that of any scenario where multiple security realms has the potential to exist, such as the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).