E-Id Authentication and Uniform Access to Cloud Storage Service Providers

Abstract

This article describes an architecture for authentication and uniform access to protected data stored on popular Cloud Storage Service Providers. This architecture takes advantage of the OAuth authentication mechanism and the strong authentication mechanism of the National Electronic Identity (E-Id) Cards, in our case the Portuguese E-Id card or Cartao de Cidadao (CC). We shall present a comparison of authentication mechanisms and access to popular cloud storage providers, comparing the different authentication mechanisms OAuth 1.0, OAuth 1.0a and OAuth 2.0. Using the proposed architecture we have developed an implementation of this architecture that provides a uniform web based access to popular Cloud Storage Service Providers such as Drop box, Skydrive, Cloudpt and Google Drive using the authentication mechanism of the E-Id card as a unique access token. In order to provide a uniform access to these services we shall describe the differences in the various REST APIs for the targeted providers. Finally the web application that allows users that hold E-Id cards a single point of access to their various cloud storage services will be presented.