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

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Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2016)

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All USDL-SEC classes and properties are prefixed with the usdl-sec namespace. To avoid notational clutter, this namespace is omitted here.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 644814. The authors would like to thank the partners of the PaaSword project (www.paasword.eu) for their valuable advice and comments.

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Correspondence to Iraklis Paraskakis .

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Veloudis, S., Paraskakis, I., Verginadis, Y., Patiniotakis, I., Mentzas, G. (2017). A Generic Framework for Representing Context-Aware Security Policies in the Cloud. In: Helfert, M., Ferguson, D., Méndez Muñoz, V., Cardoso, J. (eds) Cloud Computing and Services Science. CLOSER 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 740. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62594-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62594-2_17

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