The Use of Blockchain for Identity and Access Management (IAM) in Multi-cloud

Multi-cloud systems use more than one cloud service provider (SP). A user’s digital identity is required to access services from various Cloud SPs. The user’s identity may be duplicated across multiple cloud instances, complicating identity management (IdM). Federated identity management (FIdM) is an arrangement that can be made between a group of SPs and an identity provider (IdP) to allow a user to use the same identification information to gain access to cloud SP in the group, by signing in to only one. The limitations of FIdM are that user data is centralised, hence there is a single point of failure; there is no guarantee that SPs and IdPs will not misuse user identity, there is limited scalability, and centralised systems can struggle to keep up with demand as they grow. In this paper, we propose a CloudBloc model that utilises a blockchain as a mechanism for FIdM in multi-cloud. When a user logs in to the Cloud SP, they are redirected to the blockchain frontend where they can log in to the blockchain using their public private key pair. The public key is stored in the blockchain, and the private key is securely stored in the user’s wallet. The blockchain has smart contracts and user identity information. The smart contract is used to authenticate the user. Once a user has been authenticated, the smart contract generates a token. The user can then use the token to gain access to any Cloud SP in the group.