Strong Authentication: Closing The Front Door To Prevent Unauthorised Access To Cloud Resources

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm where IT resources such as applications, software and hardware are made available over the Internet. However, inadequate authentication on the cloud is one of the major contributing factors to identity theft, leakage of sensitive data and security problems in general. Identity theft and leakage of sensitive data comes with a high risk for breached cloud customers. Such customers could suffer embarrassment, huge financial loss, bankruptcy or even lose their competitive edge. Hence, from the cloud customers' perspective, it is important that the cloud providers have the ability to protect their login credentials, prove their authenticity and prevent unauthorised access to their cloud-based IT resources through world class and proven authentication models, tools and architectures. Hence, this paper proposes strong authentication architecture to mitigate the leakage of sensitive information due to inadequate authentication on the cloud. The proposed architecture seamlessly authenticating end-users with a number of attributes such as device ID, geo-location, time of access etc. Our findings reflect that even though strong authentication has been around it is the better solution to prove identity and authenticity of cloud customers, its adoption has been slow. However, current trends indicate that the adoption of strong authentication is on the rise and will become the dominant and best practice authentication scheme in the future for cloud. With proper cost, risk and benefit analysis strong authentication can be applied to most cloud providers or any other organisations. The main objective is to ultimately prevent unauthorised access to customer data on the cloud through strong authentication.