An authentication framework for peer-to-peer cloud

Cloud computing provides on demand computation and storage services delivered via applications, system software and hardware rendered as services. Due to its on demand nature, it has high variable workloads and requires real-time efficiency and availability. Most cloud computing systems use a centralised model to provision services, but reliance on a central entity to control scheduling decision and maintain all cloud hosts may constitute a computing bottleneck. A system failure will cause service outage, sometimes for a few hours as had happened before. In addition, the central entity needs to support heavy workloads in terms of service provisioning to all resource hosts. These issues can be addressed by distributing cloud resources using structured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks as was recently proposed. However these proposals do not examine potential security issues of a P2P-based cloud, one of them being how peers verify the identities of one another over a decentralised setting. Therefore we propose an authentication framework for P2P cloud consisting of various approaches for authenticating entities and messages. The framework combines cryptographic primitives and security mechanisms proposed for existing structured P2P network.