V. Snasel, J. Platos, and E. El-Qawasmeh (Eds.): ICDIPC 2011, Part II, CCIS 189, pp. 268–279, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Towards New Data Access Control Technique Based on Multi Agent System Architecture for Cloud Computing Amir Mohamed Talib, Rodziah Atan, Rusli Abdullah, and Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad Faculty of Computer Science & IT, Information System Department, University Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia ganawa53@yahoo.com, (rodziah,rusli,masrah)@fsktm.upm.edu.my Abstract. With the rise of the era of “cloud computing”, concerns about “Secu- rity” continue to increase. Cloud computing environments impose new chal- lenges on access control techniques due to the growing scale and dynamicity of hosts within the cloud infrastructure; we proposed Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture. This architecture consists of two agents: Cloud Service Provider Agent (CSPA) and Cloud Data Confidentiality Agent (CDConA). CSPA pro- vides a graphical interface to the cloud user that facilitates the access to the ser- vices offered by the system. CDConA provides each cloud user by definition and enforcement expressive and flexible access structure as a logic formula over cloud data file attributes. This new access control is named as Formula- Based Cloud Data Access Control (FCDAC). A prototype of our proposed FCDAC will be designed using Prometheus Methodology and implemented us- ing the Java Agent Development Framework Security (JADE-S). Keywords: Cloud Computing, Cloud Data Storage, Cloud Service Provider, Cloud Data Access Control, Multi-Agent System and Confidentiality. 1 Introduction Cloud computing describes applications that are extended to be accessible through the Internet. These cloud applications use large data centers or cloud data storage (CDS) and powerful servers that host Web applications and Web services. Anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard browser can access a cloud application. Cloud computing consists of multiple cloud computing service providers (CSPs). In terms of software and hardware, a cloud system is composed of many types of com- puters, storage devices, communications equipment, and software systems running on such devices. Cloud storage is composed of thousands of storage devices clustered by network, distributed file systems and other storage middleware to provide cloud storage service for cloud users. The typical structure of cloud storage includes storage resource pool, distributed file system, service level agreements (SLAs), and service interfaces, etc. Globally, they can be divided by physical and logical functions boundaries and