Secure cloud computing with skidentity: A cloud-teamroom for the automotive industry

Abstract

A major security-challenge in the automotive industry is to enable the secure and flexible engineering cooperation with changing partners in complex development projects. Therefore an effective interorganizational identity management is needed to control access to cooperative development platforms. This identity management has to be based on reliable identification of engineers of various partners with different credentials. The SkIDentity-Project, that aims to build trusted identities for the cloud, addresses this scenario. By integrating the existing components, services and trust infrastructures into a comprehensive, legally valid and economically viable identity infrastructure the technology enables to provide trusted identities for the cloud and secure complete business processes and value chains. One pilot-application of the project is the “Cloud-Teamroom for the Automotive Industry”. It is adjusted to the specific requirements of the value chains in the automotive industry. Thanks to the SkIDentity-Technology, and via the so-called eID-Broker, engineers from different partners can access the cloudteamroom. For the required strong authentication they can use the credentials that are already available in their company. This paper presents the SkIDentitytechnology and exemplifies it by means of the pilot-application.