PpBAC: Popularity Based Access Control Model for Cloud Computing

1. Introduction

In IT sector, cloud computing technology is widely used for the data communication process (Deka & Das, 2014). Cloud computing can be defined as a type of advanced area, where numerous distributed and parallel systems are interconnected. It involves many autonomous technologies like network system, utility computing, distributed processing, web services and hardware virtualization. The term “cloud computing” was first introduced in 1996 for describing a model, where all the desktop applications were running on the cloud. In 2007, cloud computing was accepted by all researchers, when a collaboration was made between Google and IBM. Cloud computing offers reducing IT cost, scalability, business continuity, flexibility and unlimited storage (Deka et al., 2013; Deka & Borah, 2012). It also offers users to use cloud when they demand it, and users need not to worry about the software or hardware in a cloud environment. In the cloud computing environment, the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) entity provides the cloud services. The Data Owner (DO) entity stores his/her data on the cloud environment, and cloud customers or users access files or data using the internet. By using the cloud computing, many business models are developed (Armbrust et al., 2010), which may be described by the term “X as a service (XaaS)”. Here, X may be hardware, platform, etc. With the gradually growth, cloud environment also faces many difficulties (Vaquero et al., 2011; Namasudra et al., 2017a; Xiao & Xiao, 2013). Data confidentiality, data security and access control are the most challenging issues of cloud computing.