Colluder detection in SaaS cloud applications with subscription based license

Abstract

The use of web applications has been increased by the rapid growth of the Internet. The software application providers moved to cloud computing and offered software as a service (SaaS) as the basis for software delivery to minimize the unauthorized copying of applications by stealing the product key or transforming the license file of the applications. Different forms of SaaS application licensing schemes exist. Subscription-based license has many benefits for the service provider as the business can forecast its revenue through this and can provide its products with better service as well as from the point of view of the customer; customers can relax for the whole subscription duration, can use the application without worry and can get service at any time. Most SaaS application providers support this because of the advantages of the subscription-based licensing scheme. This leads to another problem of unauthorized use of an application’s user authentication data. Upon subscription, application providers provide user authentication. But the user authentication information has been exchanged with other entities knowingly or unknowingly. Therefore, many individuals use the same authentication information to access the application, which leads to a huge loss for service providers. The loss is in the form of finance, an excessive spike in cloud server traffic and an increased burden on customer service provision. We proposed a new method for user authentication that will make it easier to memorize and identify colluders. The proposed method automatically keeps tracks of user system with its unique key and detects colluders.