A Logical Approach to Cloud Federation

Abstract: Federated clouds raise a variety of challenges for managing identity, resource access, naming, connectivity, and object access control. This paper shows how to address these challenges in a comprehensive and uniform way using a data-centric approach. The foundation of our approach is a trust logic in which participants issue authenticated statements about principals, objects, attributes, and relationships in a logic language, with reasoning based on declarative policy rules. We show how to use the logic to implement a trust infrastructure for cloud federation that extends the model of NSF GENI, a federated IaaS testbed. It captures shared identity management, GENI authority services, cross-site interconnection using L2 circuits, and a naming and access control system similar to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), but extended to a federated system without central control.