A Generic Framework for Representing Context-Aware Security Policies in the Cloud

Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud computing in order to reduce costs and increase agility in their everyday business operations. Nevertheless, due mainly to confidentiality, privacy and integrity concerns, many organisations are reluctant to migrate their sensitive data to the cloud. In order to alleviate these security concerns, this chapter proposes the PaaSword framework: a generic PaaS solution that provides capabilities for guiding developers through the process of defining appropriate policies for protecting their sensitive data. More specifically, this chapter outlines the construction of an extensible and declarative formalism for representing policy-related knowledge, one which disentangles the definition of a policy from the code employed for enforcing it. It also outlines the construction of a suitable Context-aware Security Model, a framework of concepts and properties in terms of which the policy-related knowledge is expressed.