Consolidated Identity Management System for secure mobile cloud computing

Security issues in cloud computing are shown to be the biggest obstacle that could lower the wide benefits of the cloud systems. This obstacle may be strengthened when cloud services are accessed by mobile devices. Mobile devices could be easily lost or stolen and hence, they are easy to compromise. Additionally, mobile users tend to store access credentials, passwords and other Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in an improperly protected way. We conduct a survey and found that more than 66% of the surveyed users store PIIs in unprotected text files, cookies, or applications. To strengthen the legitimate access process over the clouds and to facilitate authentication and authorization with multiple cloud service providers, third-party Identity Management Systems (IDMs) have been proposed and implemented. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of the state-of-the-art cloud IDMs with respect to mobile clients. Specifically, we show that the current IDMs are vulnerable to three attacks, namely – IDM server compromise, mobile device compromise, and network traffic interception. Most importantly, we propose and validate a new IDM architecture dubbed Consolidated IDM (CIDM) that countermeasures these attacks. We conduct experiments to evaluate the performance and the security guarantees of CIDM and compare them with those of current IDM systems. Our experiments show that CIDM provides its clients with better security guarantees and that it has less energy and communication overhead compared to the current IDM systems. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.