Case Study: Subscribing to a Friend's Cloud

4 Dec 2012 draft; needs review by Phil and Maciej

Introduction

As part of his CloudOS series of blog posts, Phil Windley describes how people who have "personal clouds" may want to subscribe to each other's clouds in order to get various kinds of access to them. UMA has a role to play in enabling Alice to gain access to feeds of Bob's information sourced from various protected cloud-based hosts used by him, and vice versa – without requiring a perfectly symmetric sharing relationship between them.

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Phil posits that if people are to have functional, effective personal clouds, they need a CloudOS that manages essential functions. One of these functions is an authorization service to enable selective access to cloud data, and one of the use cases for authorization is the ability for Bob to request various kinds of access to Alice's various resources (and vice versa). Alice's personal cloud may include resources as diverse as social networking accounts and the online controls for physical equipment such as cards cars and DVRs.

Today's systems for enabling sharing of online resources have the following downsides.

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The UMA group's Google TechTalk video from February 2012 demonstrates how the SMARTAM authorization service could be used to provide subscription request workflows.