On Usage Control of Multimedia Content in and through Cloud Computing Paradigm

Multimedia content dissemination is a complex problem because of the multitude of policy types that providers may wish to associate with their content. There have been quite a few efforts at defining security policies and models which can cater to these types of requirements. Usage control models are the new breed of access control models that allow description of comprehensive policies for usage of protected content. In this paradigm, decisions regarding access to objects is not limited to request time only. It is coupled with the usage of the protected objects and becomes a continuous process carried out in parallel to the usage. The realization of usage control has been a long standing research problem to overcome the issue of loss of control in secure document dissemination. With the emergence of cloud computing, documents are stored in the cloud, the document viewers and editors themselves reside in the cloud and are accessed from thin clients such as browsers. We note that such scenarios provide an ideal opportunity for the realization of usage control for securing the usage of documents based on the stakeholders' policies. In this paper, we argue for a better realization of different features of the UCON model in the cloud based applications. We propose a robust architecture to provide fine-grained control over usage of protected objects through the use of emerging cloud computing paradigm. We present the design principles for this realization and discuss our prototype implementation of the proposed architecture.