Matchmaking semantic security policies in heterogeneous clouds

The adoption of the cloud paradigm to access IT resources and services has posed many security issues which need to be cared of. Security becomes even a much bigger concern when services built on top of many commercial clouds have to interoperate. Among others, the value of the service delivered to end customers is strongly affected by the security of network which providers are able to build in typical SOA contexts. Currently, every provider advertises its own security strategy by means of proprietary policies, which are sometimes ambiguous and very often address the security problem from a non-uniform perspective. Even policies expressed in standardized languages do not appear to fit a dynamic scenario like the SOA’s, where services need to be sought and composed on the fly in a way that is compatible with the end-to-end security requirements. We then propose an approach that leverages on the semantic technology to enrich standardized security policies with an ad-hoc content. The semantic annotation of policies enables machine reasoning which is then used for both the discovery and the composition of security-enabled services. In the presented approach the semantic enrichment of policies is enforced by an automatic procedure. We further developed a semantic framework capable of matchmaking in a smart way security capabilities of providers and security requirements of customers, and tested it on a use case scenario