An OAuth Implementation on the OwnCloud for Secure Access by Social Networking Sites

Abstract

There has been advancement in the area of cloud storage services as well as a tremendous growth in the embrace of social media sites. Allowing one Web service to act on our behalf of another has become increasingly important as social Internet services such as blogs, photo sharing, and social networks have become widely popular. With this increased cross-site media sharing arises numerous security implications and thus the need to come up with security protocols and considerations. OwnCloud is an enterprise file sync and share that is hosted in user’s data center, on user’s servers, using user’s storage. OwnCloud’s server is flexible to enable Information Technology experts to protect and manage files within the OwnCloud environment; from file storage to user provisioning and data processing. OAuth, a new protocol for establishing identity management standards across services, provides an alternative to sharing our user-names and passwords, and exposing ourselves to attacks on our on-line data and identities. We are therefore proposing an OAuth implementation to the OwnCloud environment for Secure Access by Social Networking Sites like Facebook and Twitter.